This gin is made from wild food found around Wicklow

Foraging to eat is so last year, says Jonathan deBurca Butler. Instead, go for a walk in the countryside and pluck from the trees, the ingredients for a gin and tonic

IT’S a fresh Thursday morning, and I am on a quiet country road, and knee-deep in what looks like a tangle of overgrown grass and weeds. I am in Wicklow, foraging for ingredients to make Glendalough Gin, and those ingredients are all around me.

“There are a lot of flavours that you think you’d find only in India and China,” says our guide, Geraldine Kavanagh. “But these spicy or exotic flavours are actually all made up of chemicals and I think those same chemicals exist everywhere. So I can find something here that tastes like clove or coriander or almond. I just have to look for it.”