It’s unlikely you’d immediately clock Lesley Gracie as someone who helped reshape an entire drinks category. When the master distiller tells ELLE about her world-famous, award-winning gins, she begins with flowers. “I think, at the moment, I’ve got 63 or 64 orchids,” Gracie says, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “And every time I see another one when I go shopping, I fetch it home and try to hide it from the husband.”
This is the creative mind behind Hendrick’s Gin: Gracie is not only a professional chemist, she’s also a sort of botanical bowerbird who compulsively collects plants, unable to pass a leaf without rubbing it between her fingers to see what it might become. “It’s always that ‘what if,’” she says. “What if I do that with it? What if I put it with that?” This curiosity is what’s put the picturesque coastal town of Girvan, Scotland, firmly on the map.
Gracie’s lab is tucked inside the Hendrick’s Gin Palace, a surreal sanctum with dark graphite brick and the kind of huge glass windows one might expect to find at a classical museum. She’s relaxed, warm, and quick to laugh, with the easy confidence of someone more interested in her craft than in narrating her importance within it. Though she’s spent decades at Hendrick’s, she resists the idea that any part of her career was particularly strategic. Instead, she’s followed a persistent fascination. “I can’t imagine anything worse than doing a job that you don’t like,” she says. “It’s too important a part of your life.”
Born and raised in Northern England, Gracie trained as a chemist and began her career in pharmaceuticals, where her job was to make unpleasant medicines palatable. It was an accidental study in alchemic transformation—how to take something purely functional and turn it into a form people might actually want. In 1988, she joined distiller William Grant & Sons after moving to Scotland with her “current husband,” phrasing she still uses to “keep him on his toes.” Soon, the question that would define her career arrived from then-chairman Charles Gordon: Could she develop a new kind of gin?
At the time, the category was relatively stagnant, defined by a handful of legacy brands. So Gracie followed her nose somewhere new, building a flavor profile that felt more like an English garden than a spirit—rich with notes of cucumber and rose, housed in a Victorian apothecary bottle. It took testing, discarding, and recalibrating before it felt distinctly Hendrick’s. “When I taste something, I see it as a shape,” she says. “It’s got to be nice and round.” When William Grant & Sons first launched its new gin brand in 1999, her recipe shook the sleepy category wide awake.
Gin, the Lesley Gracie Way
The master distiller doesn’t take her gin the way most people do. While the default might be tonic, Gracie reaches for elderflower cordial and soda water. The adjustment “lifts everything up,” softening the spirit’s bitterness and drawing out the floral notes while still allowing the juniper to hold its ground. The drink feels entirely in line with her approach to distilling: less about tradition for tradition’s sake, more about coaxing out something dimensional and unexpected.
Still, despite the brand’s now-cult status, the master distiller insists that there’s more than one way to be Hendrick’s. Rather than bottling formulas, Gracie chases feelings. Each expression begins somewhere specific: a place, a moment, a sensory imprint. On a trip to Venezuela, for example, one plant stopped her cold. Crushed, its leaves and flowers released something spicy and floral that echoed the soul of Hendrick’s itself. So, back in Scotland, she worked to capture the essence of the rainforest. “Now, when I take the top off a bottle of Amazonia and smell it, all the memories come flooding back,” she says.
Gracie’s latest creation, Another Hendrick’s, is grounded in something much closer to home. “I’m a complete chocoholic,” she admits matter-of-factly. What strikes her isn’t just the taste, but the cacao tree itself, with its fleeting blossoms that flower briefly along the trunk before disappearing. On a trip to Mexico, Gracie serendipitously encountered a drink garnished with one of the beguiling blossoms. What she discovered on closer inspection wasn’t the expected richness of chocolate, but something more nuanced; floral, aromatic, surprisingly light.
That moment became the seed. Back in her lab, consulting with the plants in the distillery’s lush greenhouses and the bits and bobs in her “Cabinet of Curiosities,” she began the “great fun” of translation. Cacao, Gracie explains, is notoriously difficult to integrate into gin, “because it has so much depth to it.” The solution was not to fight it, but to reframe it, pairing cacao with Mediterranean-born orange blossom to balance its weight. The result is bright and velvety, something that feels at once familiar and subtly shifted—a kind of fraternal twin to her original recipe. “It’s obviously still Hendrick’s,” Gracie says. “But it’s like looking at Hendrick’s from the opposite side.”
Gracie has spent decades working this way, embracing possibility. It’s a philosophy she chalks up to her father’s advice, which she now passes on to her grandchildren: “If you want it, go for it.” After all, you might just end up macheting your way through a Venezuelan forest, having a creative breakthrough in a Mexican bar, or just showing up to your day job every day with genuine excitement. “I should be retired by now,” she says, laughing, “but I just can’t walk away.” After all, there’s always another leaf to rub between her fingers. Another faraway place she hasn’t visited yet. Another, as she puts it, “what if.”
