Gin & Botanical Garden

[07:08, 9/5/2022] Hotel Annunziata: With just under 90 km and about an hour and a half by car from our Hotel Annunziata in Ferrara you can reach the coastal botanical garden of Porto Caleri, a nature reserve located in Porto Caleri, the extreme edge of the Rosolina Mare coast. It covers about 44 hectares and aims to preserve a spontaneous natural environment, in which the different conformations of the environment and vegetation are clearly visible as you move from the pine forest to the dunes and from the beach to the lagoon. Unlike a botanical garden, human interventions are limited to the maintenance and safety of the paths that allow visitors to visit it. In fact, three different circular and contiguous paths of different lengths, partly built on stilts, allow you to closely observe the environment: the shortest particularly affects the pine forest, the intermediate one which goes from the coast to the inland dunes with the exception of the brackish area and the longest which includes them all: pine forest, sands, Mediterranean scrub and wetlands.
Between the pine forest and the sandy dunes near the sea, a unique juniper is born, in fact it remains green for a long time before becoming black-purplish (the classic color of mature common juniper); this is due to the type of soil, arid and sandy, in which it grows. Its berries are in fact very resinous, balsamic, herbaceous and with a slight brackish flavor.
Enrico Crivellari and his partner Silvana Marangon hand-pick the green berries of the juniper plants that grow wild among the sand dunes. Since 2019 they have been transforming Rosolina juniper into the most British form of good drinking above 37 degrees, Gin. Gin Caleri is produced with the Cold Compound method (cold infusion), practically only the berries are infused in barley alcohol of extraordinary quality; in this way it is cold extracted, not through the classic alembic, and keeps the berry intact. The result is a product that encloses and transmits the aromas and flavors of the sea to the palate. So after a visit to the Porto Caleri Botanical Garden, why not indulge yourself with a good Gin Tonic in Rosolina Mare made by Enrico and Silvana, to stimulate the taste buds?