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Woodstock is only a 20 minute bus ride away from central Oxford, but once you’re there you couldn’t feel further from the slightly horrible, sweaty bustle of the city in summer. The village, also home to Blenheim Palace, is slightly reminiscent of a Midsomer Murders set with its sleepy charm, abundance of pubs and suspicious-looking locals. Yet it was neither the scenery nor the prospect of being murdered by a vengeful vicar with a pitchfork that had brought me and my companion to the village: it was the gin.

Woodstock is home to The Feathers Hotel, which boasts a restaurant and bar specialising in gin. In fact, specialising is a bit of an understatement:  the Feathers bar stocks almost 100 different gins from all over the world, and eight tonics to boot. What’s more, the two of us had signed ourselves up for the ‘Gin Experience’, a five-course meal (although it turned out to be eight), where that finest of spirits features in every course. To someone who considers Gordon’s to be a decadent departure from Tesco’s own-brand, the prospect was rather overwhelming.

I can only apologise in advance for the number of puns one can make using the word gin. Ginteresting, gintense, ginspirational, gintimate – all of these go some way to describing the ‘Experience’. We were first offered quails eggs and pâté (the first unexpected surprise) while we hastily attempted to read the descriptions of the dozens of gins on the menu. Making an informed choice was inevitably impossible, so I opted for a gin beginning with ‘I’, and my companion went for the one with the longest blurb. The two resultant G&Ts were completely different to the taste, thus enabling us to copy our waiter by making a number of pretentious remarks to each other about “notes of juniper” and “rich botanicals”.

Things flowed smoothly on from there, with a slightly strange – but wonderfully rich – celeriac soup in an espresso cup proving another unexpected delight before the meal-proper began. I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing how the gin appeared in each of the courses that followed (mackerel, quail, crab, lamb, sorbet and lemon Bomb Alaska), but among its guises were jelly, a shot of Red Snapper and a flaming sauce in a silver saucepan. The food was delicious and the portions perfect – small enough that we never felt too full for the next one, but never quite that irritating ‘expensive restaurant’ kind of small. My personal favourite was the softshell crab, but the quail’s leg stuffed with black pudding came a very close second.

An added bonus was that, despite clearly being a Very Good and Expensive restaurant, the atmosphere of The Feathers was welcomingly unstuffy. Although we were obviously students, the maître’d was as attentive to us as he was to the very fat businessman on the next table, and once we began to feel the full effects of the gin we didn’t feel that we had to keep our laughter too quiet.

Sadly, the price of the Gin Experience might prove prohibitive for students: coming in at just under £200 (including a bottle of wine and service) the meal was very far from cheap. But for a very special occasion or as a birthday present for a big ginthusiast (my own reason for going), you really couldn’t ask for better. Gincredible.

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