In general, let it be known that the supermarket is not the best place to buy liquor. What you can find isn't generally great, and a limited selection means that they'll stock what people know, not what's actually the best value for spend.
I mean, think about your favorite bourbon, scotch, rum, rye, or tequila. Is that something you expect them to have on the shelf at Safeway? Now, If your go-to brand is Jim Beam or Smirnoff, you might have a different answer, but it begs the question: why are you here, making the investment to read this text only to buy the same shit you always buy?
Here's the weird thing about Tanqueray: it’s the exception to the supermarket rule. True, it is everywhere. A quick Google search tells me Diageo, the parent company, moves about 36 million bottles of the gin a year worldwide. That's just about enough to give every man, woman, and child in all of Canada a bottle of gin. So of course you've heard of it, but it's one of those rare cases where the default option in a spirit category is actually a pretty good one.
“Other gins define themselves by dialing back the juniper and adding more citrus and funky botanicals. Tanqueray proves you don’t have to.”
What makes Tanqueray interesting to me is that it's basically the standard bearer for a very particular kind of flavor. If you look at the side of the bottle, you'll find the phrase “London Dry.” And if you've ever wondered what that means, I'm going to tell you.
Back in the mid to late 1800s, liquor wasn't all that great and cocktails were what you ordered at a bar if you wanted to enjoy the process of drinking. If you were some working stiff or some yokel from the country, you wanted a really, really sweet drink since you could only afford one of them every now and again.
However, among the upper-class types and sophisticates you'd likely find in a metropolitan city like London—that is, people who had the money to buy a shit-ton of drinks—throwing back a bunch of liquid candy grew a little tiresome and upset their stomachs.
Enter the “dry” spirit style. As everyone tends to do with things that are fashionable, the sugar-laden Old Tom gin became yesterday's news and London Dry gin saturated the market. It was the drink of those who pioneered the three-martini lunch, or alternately, what you drank if you hoped to fit in with an elite club of wealthy alcoholics at some point in your future.
So if you're not getting sweetness, what are you getting? The answer is juniper: that wonderfully pine-heavy, forest fresh botanical that makes gin what it is. There are other tastes in there that you can tease out, but it's a juniper show all the way. So much so that if you're wondering what an unabashedly juniper-forward gin tastes like, Tanqueray is the answer. It was historically, and remains so now.
That fact is deserving of some pause. Some people don't like juniper—that's understandable: it can be an extremely strong flavor, and vodka sales will always be brisk because a lot of people are just really boring. But for all of the “New American” styles of gin and the countless brands that label themselves as quirky, unconventional, delicate, or what have you, they're basically defining themselves in direct oppositon to Tanqueray. They dial back the juniper, add more citrus, and/or throw in a bunch of other funky botanicals simply to be different.
But Tanqueray proves you don't have to. It's simple. When you make a gin and tonic or a martini, your taste buds are hunting for that familiar pine-heavy pop, and mine feel a little disappointed when they don't get it. It's also a bold spirit, with the 47% ABV giving you good value for $20 or $25. Although that 7% doesn't seem like much, it allows the spirit to stand up to some pretty bold mixers without ever feeling watery. Tanqueray is very, very hard working.
True, it lacks nuance. It's always been a juniper backbreaker, and its polarizing nature has meant that (until recent brand extensions like Rangpur or the wholly excellent Tanqueray Ten) it was leaving money on the table for other subtler, multilayered gins to pick up. Admittedly, that lack of refinement does mean that while I’m a fan of the simplicity and honesty of the standard Tanqueray, it isn't my most favorite of favorites and wouldn’t be in my personal top ten.
All that said, it's nice to know that a superlative “ginny” gin is always at reach. If you're caught flat footed at a party, you can without fail run to the grocery store and get a fifth of Tanqueray, some limes, and some tonic water. Even now in the middle of a global pandemic, I'm wholly confident the nearest store has all of those things.
If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people who have had Tanqueray, it's worth a studied revisit to see what the spirit really has to offer, and how its clean, crisp, clear flavor has stood the test of decades. But assuming you haven't, there's no time like the present to throw a fifth of the stuff in your shopping cart.
