The road from Skopje climbs sharply into the Šar Mountains, leaving behind the Ottoman-era bazaars and the haze of the Vardar valley. By the time you reach the village of Brezno, at just over a thousand metres above sea level, the landscape has become something altogether wilder — limestone crags draped in dark forest, the air sharp with resin and thyme. It is here, on these remote Macedonian slopes, that a significant proportion of the world's gin supply quietly begins.
Juniperus communis grows wild across much of the Northern Hemisphere, but the berries harvested in the western Balkans — particularly in North Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo — are prized by distillers for their intensity and aromatic complexity. Unlike the cultivated juniper found in parts of Italy and Spain, Balkan juniper grows untended on mountainsides, absorbing the particular mineral character of the soil and the extremes of a continental climate.
The Harvest
I arrived in late October, the peak of the harvest season. The work is done almost entirely by hand, as it has been for generations. Families from the surrounding villages spread through the mountains at dawn, carrying large canvas sheets and wooden sticks. The technique is deceptively simple: a sheet is laid beneath a juniper bush, and the branches are struck firmly with the stick. Ripe berries — dark purple-blue and slightly soft — fall to the sheet, while unripe green berries remain stubbornly attached to the branch.
"My grandmother did this, and her grandmother before her," said Elena Jovanovska, a forty-three-year-old harvest worker I followed through a steep hillside grove. "The bushes know us. We know which ones give the best berries." She pointed to a gnarled specimen growing from a crack in the limestone, its berries notably larger than those on the trees nearby. "That one — every year, the best."
From Mountain to Market
After collection, the berries are spread on drying racks in village courtyards, turned twice daily for up to three weeks until the moisture content drops to the level that buyers demand — typically around twelve per cent. The dried berries are then graded by hand, sorted by size and colour, before being packed into hessian sacks for transport to the collection points run by export companies in Skopje and Tirana.
From there, the berries travel to distilleries across the world. Major botanical suppliers like Beacon Commodities in London and Muller & Phipps in Hamburg act as intermediaries, sourcing from Balkan harvesters and supplying distillers from Sipsmith in Chiswick to Roku in Osaka. The journey from a Macedonian mountainside to a bottle of London Dry gin might span six months and five thousand miles.
A Fragile Economy
The economics of juniper harvesting are precarious. Harvesters are typically paid between three and five euros per kilogram of dried berries, and a skilled worker can gather perhaps fifteen to twenty kilograms per day — arduous work on steep, rocky terrain. For many families in these remote mountain communities, juniper represents a crucial source of autumn income, supplementing subsistence farming and livestock herding.
But the supply chain faces challenges. Climate change is affecting fruiting patterns, with some harvesters reporting increasingly erratic yields. A fungal disease, Phytophthora austrocedri, has devastated juniper populations in parts of the UK and is being monitored anxiously across southern Europe. And as younger generations migrate to cities, the pool of experienced harvesters is shrinking.
The Taste of Place
Standing in a juniper grove above Brezno as the October light turned golden, I crushed a handful of fresh berries between my fingers and breathed deeply. The aroma was extraordinary — resinous and bright, with layers of pine, pepper, and something almost floral that I hadn't expected. It bore the same relationship to dried juniper from a spice jar as a garden tomato does to a supermarket one: recognisably the same thing, but immeasurably more vivid.
Several distillers I spoke with for this piece emphasised the importance of Balkan juniper to their products. "We've tried Italian, we've tried Croatian, we've tried wildcrafted berries from the Scottish Highlands," said one London-based distiller. "Nothing matches the Macedonian berries for depth and complexity. They're the foundation of our gin."
As I drove back down towards Skopje in the fading light, the sacks of berries loaded into Elena's husband's van, I found myself thinking about the invisible thread that connects these mountains to every gin and tonic poured in London, New York, and Tokyo. It begins here, with calloused hands and canvas sheets, on slopes where the wild juniper has grown since before anyone thought to distil it.
