How One Distiller Rewrote the Rules of Gin and Sparked a Flavor Revolution

Lesley Gracie doesn’t just taste flavor — she sees it. When she sips a spirit, it appears in her mind as a shape: round and smooth when it’s balanced, jagged when something is off. 

“Sometimes you taste something and it’s got a really sharp edge in it,” she says. “I just get the sort of shape with a piece sticking out. And for me, it’s got to be balanced.” Hendrick’s, the gin she has made for more than two decades as the brand's master distiller, has always been a circle in her mind — the Bennet distillate forming “the heart,” the Carter‑Head rising around it “almost like a halo.”

Those two distillates are the foundation of Hendrick’s unusual character. The Bennett, a 19th‑century copper pot still, steeps botanicals overnight to produce a heavier, richer spirit. The Carter‑Head, built in the mid‑20th century, contains a botanical basket in its neck that allows alcohol vapors to pass through a range of delicate botanicals, yielding a lighter, more floral distillate. By combining them, Gracie produces a gin that is both robust and lifted, a round shape with no jagged edges — the geometry she insists on.

That sensory logic has guided Gracie since long before she became one of the most influential distillers in the modern gin world. A chemist by training, she started her career in pharmaceuticals, where she learned how to tame bitter flavors in liquid medicines. 

Decades ago she moved to Scotland “to marry the current husband — that’s what I call him to keep him on his toes” as she wryly puts it — a phrase that hints at her dry sense of humor. Soon after, she joined William Grant & Sons and discovered that distillation offered far more room for creativity. “What you can do with distillation and the chemistry side of it really fascinated me,” she says. “With gin, the world is virtually your oyster for the different botanicals and combinations.”

That curiosity caught the attention of Charles Gordon, the great‑grandson of William Grant, who in the late 1990s tasked her with creating a gin unlike anything on the back bar at the time. He wanted something “totally different” in both flavor and method, produced on the two antique stills he had rescued from auction decades earlier. The challenge set Gracie on the path that would become Hendrick’s — a spirit built from dual distillates and finished with rose and cucumber, instantly distinctive and destined to redefine the category. In doing so, Hendrick’s, launched in 1999, helped usher in a new wave of gins beyond the traditional London Dry style. Distillers around the world began incorporating regional botanicals and experimenting more freely, taking permission from Hendrick’s to push boundaries and expand what gin could be.

Her curiosity quickly became her signature. She’s the kind of person who can’t walk through a garden center without rubbing leaves between her fingers to release their aroma. She travels with a mental catalog of plants she’s encountered in botanic gardens, greenhouses, and remote corners of the world. In 2013, a chance meeting in Philadelphia led her deep into southwest Venezuela, where she lived among a local community and encountered entirely new species. “It was an amazing opportunity to just look at different things,” she says. “There are so many plants, so many different varieties. There is so much opportunity to do something that is different.”

That instinct — the constant “what if?” — is what ultimately led to Another Hendrick’s, the brand’s first permanent addition in nine years. The idea began in Mexico, when a bartender garnished her drink with a cacao flower. Gracie plucked it out, as she tends to do, and started playing with it. “You’re still getting the cacao elements, but you also got the floral elements as well,” she remembers. Cacao had always felt too deep and complex to fit into Hendrick’s profile, but the flower opened a new door.

Back at her laboratory and distillery, the so-called Hendrick’s Gin Palace in Scotland, she turned to the greenhouses she helped design. One holds tropical plants, including cacao trees whose flowers bloom directly from the trunk. The other is filled with different kinds of citrus trees. She began experimenting, pairing cacao with different blossoms until one combination clicked: orange blossom, a bright, white flower that lifted cacao’s richness without overwhelming it. 

“They worked so well together,” she says. “You get that sort of deep, velvety, rich character that comes from the cacao, lifted again by the flavor of the orange blossom.”

The result is a gin that still reads unmistakably as Hendrick’s — juniper‑forward, round, smooth — but sits “in a totally different place” on her internal flavor map. It’s also the most personal expression she’s ever released. “Most people will tell you I’m an absolute chocoholic, and I love flowers as well,” she says with a laugh. The gin’s white bottle nods to the orange blossom’s color; the profile reflects her own obsessions.

For Gracie, the permanence of this release matters. Hendrick’s has produced a string of limited editions over the years, but this one earned a lasting place. “It is different to anything else that is out there,” she says. “It looks at gin in a different way.” It also reflects how her own perspective has grown since she first started making Hendrick’s. She wonders what Gordon would think of where the brand has gone since he first directed her to create something “totally different.”

Even after decades of experimentation, she doesn’t believe the category is anywhere near its limits. There are still plants she hasn’t tried, combinations she hasn’t tested, shapes she hasn’t seen. “There’s no way you can say, right, that’s it — all the gins that are ever going to be made have been made,” she says. “The gin path just keeps on going and it gets wider, and I find that really exciting.”