Thank you to everyone who attended our fifth Natural Narratives session on the 28th of February!
This month, we welcomed Marian from Highland Boundary, a distillery in Perthshire creating wild Scottish spirits using hand-picked botanicals. Marian spoke with us about how she aims to bring back forgotten and underappreciated Scottish flavours, such as birch, larch, gorse, honeysuckle, elderflower, and Scots pine, utilising skills from her background in biomedical research. We were able to try these bold and natural flavours ourselves as part of a free tasting, where we sampled Highland Boundary's range of spirits, liqueurs, and syrups, much to the delight of everyone involved! The Aquila Team's personal favourite was the Scots Pine Mugolio, a wild botanical syrup made from Scots pine cones and UK sugar beets.
One of the things we really appreciated from Marian's talk, was the focus on incorporating traditional foraging practices into a sustainable business. Currently, large-scale agricultural operations and monocultures are seen as the norm, so Marian's take on foraging her flavours from wild foods was a refreshing taste into how businesses can foster a healthier relationship with the land. Especially since everything was harvested locally from Perthshire!
We were also pleased to see the enthusiasm from our guests, many of whom stayed after the final tasting to continue their conversations. A huge thank you to Marian and the Highland Boundary team for sharing their warmth, wisdom, and wonderful flavours with us!
If you'd like to learn more about how to sustainably harvest your own foods from the landscape, we are hoping to run our very own foraging events in the future! Until then, there are plenty of resources out there for those who want to explore foraging on their own terms. We would also recommend checking out The Little Foragers Kitchen, which run their own courses in Oban, Glasgow, and elsewhere across Scotland.
See you next time!
~ The Aquila Team 🌱