Fluère Original

Perhaps this has the most beautiful bottle of any non-alcoholic spirit I’ve yet reviewed: a gorgeous smoky grey-blue colour with a twisted fluted pattern on the glass. It’s slightly let down by the plasticky top, but even that has a pleasing detail of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man on it. It looks elegant and vaguely fin de siècle, the kind of bottle you’d happily leave out on show.
I’m lingering over the bottle because the drink itself doesn’t quite punch as high. Perhaps I’ve just tasted too many gin-based non-alcoholic substitutes. It’s workmanlike without being exciting, and the juniper notes aren’t really strong enough to hold their own against the tonic. I don’t manage to detect anything beyond the juniper other than a faint scent of lavender. I very much wanted to like this, but sadly it just hasn’t got the oomph that the bottle so beautifully implies.