Well, I guess firstly because I was lucky enough to be asked by Charlie Gordon, our late-life president, to create a gin, something unusual and quite unlike anything else on the market at the time. But secondly because I simply fell in love with gin. It is this incredible spirit with an amazing history and there is so much freedom to experiment and play and move it in different dimensions flavourwise.

I’ve always been interested in plants and used to make teas out of twigs as a kid. I later studied chemistry and understood better how flavour was constructed. Before I joined William Grant & Sons I worked in the pharmaceutical industry and it was my job to mask the bitter flavour of certain medicines to make them palatable enough to take. Hendrick’s allows me to combine my love for plants and botanicals with my chemistry training and fascination with flavour. I’m always playing around with different flavour combinations in my lab and seeing how they work together, and the results are often surprising. It’s definitely part art and part science. The most difficult thing is understanding what something will taste like. For example, you can smell a plant but until you actually distil it you don’t quite know if and how those flavours will play out. So you have to just try it and see. But that’s the fun part for me too. Going “I wonder if…” or “what would happen if I blended this with that” and seeing what the result will be.

When I was in Venezuela on a quest to discover new botanical flavours I discovered the absolute joy that is scorpion-tale. It has this most incredible green flavour that was so intriguing and which complimented our Hendrick’s house style so well. I distilled it right there in the jungle to make Hendrick’s Kanaracuni, which was named to honour the tribe who were hosting us on the expedition. They’d only been non-nomadic for a couple of generations and they were the most generous, community-spirited people I’ve ever met. I’ve since tried scorpion-tail grown at a botanical garden in Scotland, and honestly it is not a patch on what I tasted flavourwise in Venezuela. The soil there is so rich that it really added to the depth of the flavour profile.

The rose and cucumber are our coupe de grace – they add this delicious, light, fragrant, fresh, green note to Hendrick’sthat makes it, well, Hendrick’s.

I find inspiration everywhere. I’m forever smelling the different botanicals I see. This is not just when I’m at work, but when I’m walking my dog Jock along the wild Ayrshire coast as I do most nights I noticed how the herbs by the sea smell different than those grown further in-land and how that salty sea air transports me back to my childhood, when a trip to the seaside felt magical. That sensory memory inspired Hendrick’s. The initial idea for Hendrick’s Flora Adora came to me when I was sitting in the garden one day watching the butterflies and bees and other insects at work and noticed how they seemed to hover over certain flowers more than others. It got me thinking about what it was about these plants in particular that these precious pollinators adored, and I tried to capture that enticing floral bouquet in the gin.

Well, the Cabinet of Curiosities, as you’ve seen, is a real cabinet in my lab at the heart of the Gin Palace. It’s where I store the results of my various experiments. All the different experimental liquids I’ve created and those that I’m currently playing with live there, and one by one they are released to share with the world when the time is right. This cabinet contains some amazing sensorial memories in liquid form for me – the sensation of soaking up the magic of the sea or celebrating on bright midsummer’s day. So there’s definitely lots of memories in that cabinet – all preserved for posterity in gin form.

If we could take botanicals from outer space to make a gin that is literally out of this world, that would be amazing.

Diet Coke. There really is no need for it – the red Coca-cola for me anyday.

I love Hendrick’s Gin with elderflower and soda. One of our ambassador’s made it for me one day and I ask for it so much they’ve named it “The Lesley Gracie” after me. I love it because it’s so simple and refreshing and it allows the gin to shine. Plus, I’m a big fan of elderflower.

Oooh, I couldn’t possibly tell, that’s top secret. But all of our Hendrick’s Cabinet of Curiosities releases use our original Hendrick’s recipe as the base and then push it into a different dimension. So it will be reassuringly familiar but also very curiously different at the same time.