The Stilbaai tidal fish traps are old. Older than steel fishing rods and perhaps older than agriculture itself. They are just stones. Low walls of rock packed tightly in a series of gentle semicircles along the shores of the beach, but standing inside them at low tide, watching tiny hermit crabs scuttle their way through the pools, you feel something shift in your sense of scale. People have lived off this land for a very long time.
It was Inverroche that brought me here. The Stilbaai-born sustainable luxury gin brand had recently been acquired by Pernod Ricard, and while I had expected a briefing on botanicals and brand philosophy, I hadn’t expected to end up thinking about the origins of human civilisation before lunch.
But the movements behind these origins, once bared to us, seem unmistakably obvious. Standing on the beach, our tour guide and accomplished academic Jan de Vynck explored the dizzying history of the Cape Floristic Region, crouching beside a low fynbos shrub and crushing a leaf between his fingers. The smell is resinous and earthy, not quite like anything you’ve encountered in a candle or a perfume, because it hasn’t been processed into anything yet. This is the raw material.
The Cape Floral Kingdom is the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms and the only one found entirely within a single country. It is also, by some measures, the richest, with nearly 9,000 plant species, most of them found nowhere else on earth. The fynbos itself comprises 7,000 to 8,500 species, making it one of the most diverse plant families in the world.
As I hold a leaf of beach spinach in my hand, De Vynck notes that it was these very resources that facilitated the growth of humanity. Growth that becomes visible in places like the 3,000-year-old Skulpiesbaai Shell Midden or Blombos Cave, where the oldest known drawing and a 100,000-year-old artist’s toolkit were first found.
“It was the perfect petri dish for this to happen, and it didn’t happen somewhere else,” he explained. The plants around us had not only survived and thrived for centuries, but humans have been using these plants — eating them, medicating with them, and burning them — for at least 250,000 years. Inverroche, the distillery we’re about to visit, has been doing it for just over a decade. In botanical terms, they are very new here.
The origin story of Inverroche begins with its founder, Lorna Scott, and involves, in rough sequence, 20 years in Scotland, a return to the small coastal town where her family had lived for generations, a career in corporate food services, a stint as deputy mayor and a postgraduate course in sustainable development undertaken at the age of 55. The distilling came later, and the origin story there is even better.
It began with a small copper pot still purchased on holiday in Italy, but the real beginning was a bucketload of pineapples and a mother with a practical mind.
“It was purely on a memory of my mother’s,” Scott explained one evening, recounting how the two of them had set about making pineapple beer. One night, the countless bottles began to explode. “She had this brilliant idea,” Scott reminisced. “And being a very hands-on, practical woman, she made a pot still with our pressure cooker and the pipes and pump from a fish tank.”
Lorna Scott did not set out to build a gin brand. She set out to understand what her region was capable of, and the still was first used to distil lavender for a perfume.
“It tasted pretty good,” Scott noted, laughing, and instead of perfume, gin became the answer — the only spirit made by infusing natural botanicals into a neutral spirit.
Today, that small copper still sits on a pedestal inside the Inverroche distillery. A gentle reminder that great things can come from humble origins. Just a short drive from our accommodation in Jongensfontein, the Inverroche Distillery is relatively small considering the brand’s distribution to over 20 countries, but the facility is quietly and consistently remarkable.
Before we go inside, technical and operations manager Morne van Rooyen stops and points to the ground. The bricks beneath our feet have become something of an inside joke within the Stilbaai community. Made with wastewater from the distillation process, Inverroche donated it to a local brickmaking company, bought the finished bricks back and lined the property with them.
The community calls them “gin bricks”, and if you try hard enough, you can just about smell the botanicals. It seems almost radical. To upgrade the property with materials made out of your own byproduct, to close that loop so completely that the waste becomes the floor. It turns out this is not an exception at Inverroche but the governing principle.
And the logic continues as we walk around the back of the property. The organic matter left after distillation feeds the compost heaps out back. The rooikrans, an invasive species introduced decades ago to stabilise sand dunes, now muscling out the indigenous fynbos across the region, is being systematically removed from the property.
The larger wood pieces fire the pot. The rest is chipped and composted. Zero waste to landfill is the policy. They use the phrase “nurturing terroir” to describe what they’re doing, which sounds almost too elegant until you see the compost heap and the rewilding project and the gin bricks and understand that it is, in fact, exactly what they mean.
Every bottle of Inverroche gin is made on-site in small batches, tested meticulously, then packaged and numbered by hand by employees from the local community. One of those employees is master distiller Andrea Francis, who began her journey with the brand packing boxes at the warehouse before applying for an apprenticeship.
On the morning we visited, she was shyly evading the gaze of our tour group — but her impact was visible everywhere.
“She now has three of her own assistants that she is mentoring,” Scott noted. “So just paying it forward. It’s not just [the] success story of a business; it’s primarily about what the original inspiration was, and that was to change lives. [Andrea] has just taken this role and created her own essence of what this is all about.”
In a small corner of the distillery lies the “tincture library”, a culmination of years of experimentation. Hundreds of bottles of different tinctures wait patiently for their moment. Bottles of undistilled strawberry, lemongrass, coriander or buchu become the palette from which Francis and the team craft their flavour profiles.
Later that day, we craft our own gin blends at the facility’s Gin Academy. My distillation is floral and citrussy with a hint of pink peppercorns, and I spend far too long drafting a name for it that doesn’t sound like a cheap perfume. The bottle of “Herlear 39” somehow survives the plane ride home, where I shove it into the hands of unsuspecting family members with all the enthusiasm of a three-year-old with new shoes. It is, I realise, exactly what Inverroche intended … not just a product to take home, but a story to tell with it.
Standing in those fish traps that morning, I had wondered what it took to build something so precisely calibrated to a place that it has outlasted everything else. The strandlopers used stone and tide. Lorna Scott used copper and fynbos. The impulse is the same: to know and love a place so thoroughly that it becomes something you can hold in your hands and that continues to give long after you’re gone.
