The road from Cortona climbs through olive groves and cypress alleys before the landscape opens into something wilder — scrubby hillside where rosemary and thyme grow untended, and where, scattered among the rocks and dry grass, you find the juniper.
Juniperus communis. The plant that makes gin gin. Without it, you have flavoured vodka. With it, you have a spirit category worth billions. And yet remarkably few gin drinkers — or even gin distillers — have ever seen juniper growing in its natural habitat.
A Botanical Pilgrimage
I came to Tuscany in late spring, when the juniper berries from the previous season are at their most aromatic, to meet Marco Ferretti, a third-generation botanical forager whose family has been harvesting wild juniper from these hills since the 1950s. His clients include several prominent gin distilleries, though he won't name them — discretion, he tells me, is part of the service.
"People think juniper is juniper," Marco says, pulling a branch towards him and crushing a berry between his thumb and forefinger. The scent is immediate and extraordinary — sharp, resinous, almost violently aromatic. "But terroir matters as much for juniper as it does for wine grapes. The soil, the altitude, the exposure to sun and wind — everything changes the flavour."
He's right. The juniper growing on these south-facing Tuscan slopes, at an altitude of around 500 metres, is notably different from the juniper you'd find in Macedonia (the world's largest commercial producer) or Scandinavia. Tuscan juniper tends to be more citrusy and floral, with a sweetness that you don't find in the sharper, more resinous northern berries.
The Harvest
Juniper berries take two to three years to mature on the bush, which means at any given time you'll find berries at different stages of ripeness — green, blue-purple, and fully black — growing on the same plant. Only the fully ripe black berries are used for gin distillation, which makes harvesting a painstaking, selective process.
Marco and his small team harvest by hand, using thick leather gloves to protect against the plant's vicious needles. Each bush yields perhaps two hundred grams of usable berries — a quantity that seems absurdly small when you consider that a single batch of gin might require twenty or thirty kilograms.
"This is why good juniper is expensive," Marco explains. "And why most distillers use Macedonian juniper — it's cheaper, available in bulk, and perfectly good. But for distillers who want something special, wild Tuscan juniper is worth the premium."
From Hillside to Still
After harvest, the berries are dried slowly in the shade — never in direct sunlight, which can drive off the volatile oils that give juniper its character. Marco's drying barn is a low stone building with slatted wooden shelves, the air inside thick with that unmistakable gin scent. The berries will spend three to four weeks here before being packed into hessian sacks and shipped to distilleries across Europe.
The journey from this quiet Tuscan hillside to a bottle of gin on a bar shelf in London or New York is one of the great unsung supply chains of the spirits world. Most consumers never think about where their gin's botanicals come from — and the industry, for the most part, doesn't encourage them to. But there's something valuable in understanding that gin, for all its urban associations, begins in places like this: wild, rural, and deeply connected to the land.
The Larger Picture
Juniper faces challenges. Climate change is altering the conditions in traditional growing regions, and juniper rust — a fungal disease — has been spreading through wild populations in parts of Europe. Some distillers have begun investing in cultivated juniper plantations as a hedge against supply disruption, but Marco is sceptical.
"Cultivated juniper doesn't have the same complexity," he insists. "It's like the difference between a wild mushroom and a farmed one. The flavour is there, but the depth isn't."
Whether the industry can continue to rely on wild-harvested juniper as demand grows is an open question. Global gin production has roughly doubled in the past decade, and juniper supply has not kept pace. Prices have risen significantly, and some in the industry worry about long-term sustainability.
An Afternoon Among the Berries
As the afternoon light softens over the Tuscan hills, Marco opens a bottle of gin made by a small Italian distillery using his juniper. We drink it neat, standing among the bushes that provided its defining ingredient, and the connection between place and spirit has never felt more direct.
It's a moment that reframes how you think about gin — not as a manufactured product, but as something that begins with a berry on a hillside, harvested by hand, dried in a stone barn, and transformed through heat and copper into something that has brought pleasure to drinkers for centuries.
The juniper forests of Tuscany are not on any tourist itinerary. There are no signs, no visitor centres, no gift shops. But for anyone who loves gin, this is where the story starts.
