When the 21st-century gin craze began in the mid-2000s, it differed from its counterpart 300 years earlier in several respects, the biggest being quality. Gradually, instead of just a few premium gins – if memory serves, Tanqueray 10, Junipero, the occasional Beefeater limited edition – hundreds of small-batch, crafted gins with individual botanical recipes became available. Yet, for a long time, the ceiling for “premium” gin was the £40 to £50 range.

In recent years, some ultra-premium gins have become available – from around £100 (Sakurao from Japan), via £200 (Anty Gin from Cambridge Distillery with, yes, essence of ant), to one-offs in the thousands. These are designed not to have tonic sloshed into them (and certainly not diluted at the 3:1 ratio one mixer brand feverishly suggests!), but to be used in martinis or even sipped neat at room temperature.

Silent Pool is the latest distillery to launch a sipping gin with its Black Juniper release. The team from the craft gin-maker located in the Duke of Northumberland’s Albury Estate in the Surrey Hills has gone to great lengths – or, more accurately, heights – to use ingredients which justify the nigh-on-£300 price tag.

Harry Keene, one of Silent Pool’s three distillers says, ‘We’re always searching for the best ingredients to use in our blends. Obviously, juniper is the most important ingredient in a gin, so we were looking for the best version of that. We kept hearing about black juniper – juniperus indica – which is used in perfume and only grows above 4,000m in the Himalayas. It grows slowly because of the temperature and the sparse soil and that causes the flavour to intensify. It contains eight more essential oils than most juniper and has this incredible sweetness on top of the woody and citrus notes you’d expect.’

The distillers decided to use other botanicals from the Himalayas to complement this juniper. They use a Nepalese black tea, which also has a particularly intense flavour due to the harsh growing conditions (just as stressed vines produce better grapes for wine). A third ingredient is cherry blossom from the same region of Nepal.

Silent Pool’s head distiller, Marzio di Rocco, says, ‘We discovered they only have two cherry trees there! They produce blossom but no fruit – it is too difficult. So the farmer who owns them, harvests one each year, and leaves the other to be pollenated. It’s so romantic! They collect just 2kg of blossom a year, of which 1kg is reserved for a perfumier. If you chew the flower, it has an intense cherry bakewell flavour. But we can’t afford to chew too many of them!’

The collection of the black juniper requires even more delicacy… Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country in the world, as well as being deeply spiritual – at 7,500m Gangkhar Puensum is the highest mountain in the world yet to be summited, because of Mahayana Buddhist beliefs about it being a home to deities. The two factors are very much intertwined. So Silent Pool enlisted the help of Bhutanese biodiversity specialist Kesang Wangchuk to put together a team of local people to hand-pick the juniper without flouting local customs.

‘My wife used to live in the area where we collect the berries,’ recalls Wangchuk. ‘We used to go for long walks in the juniper forest. To collect black juniper for Silent Pool, we put together a team of older people and young women – the young men have to tend to their farms, or climb higher to collect a magic mushroom, which has medicinal effects. The pickers walk about one or two hours from the village with bamboo baskets to fill with the berries they pick by hand, without harming the trees. They are then brought back to the village to dry in the shade for two to three months.’

The Bhutanese pickers always perform a puja ritual before collecting the berries. To reflect that, the distillers decided to have their own ritual – hand-grinding the juniper, then smoking it with oud, the deep resinous wood, again used in perfumes.

That incense note comes through on the nose, then there is a smoky earthiness on the palate with faint citrus zest. It doesn’t taste like a whisky, but it takes you on a similar journey as a neat single malt – with different flavours being highlighted on the nose, and in different parts of the mouth before changing again on the finish, where the tea and oud come to the fore. And, throughout, those intense flavours are softened by a natural sweet note – not a sugary liqueur sweetness but, again, like a sweet and smoky whisky, providing balance. And making a gin you can genuinely enjoy neat.

Silent Pool Black Juniper costs £295 for a 1 litre bottle and is available at Hedonism and Amathus, as well as at Heathrow and Dubai airports.

silentpooldistillers.com