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The Big Interview: James May

The presenter of The Grand Tour talks to Louis Thomas about getting into the gin business, why pubs are failing, and the problem with non-alcoholic drinks.

“Two pints of beer, salted peanuts and a bag of crisps for £17.50? That’s quite a lot,” says James May, clad in his hi-vis cycling jacket, delivering the drinks to our table overlooking the Thames at The Dove in Hammersmith.

“I used to go to the pub a lot in my early 20s, and I was fairly broke back then, and with the best will in the world I’m fairly well-off now, but beer seems more expensive now than it did then,” he jokes.

May is certainly a man who knows his pubs; after all he co-owns The Royal Oak in Swallowcliffe, near Salisbury in Wiltshire. He describes his motives for buying half of the pub alongside entrepreneur Simon Andrews as being “entirely selfish”.

“Myself and my partner, Sarah [Frater], have a cottage in Wiltshire that we bought on a bit of a whim eight years ago, and The Royal Oak is the only pub within walking distance,” he says. “The people who owned it gave up on it and were going to sell it, and there were rumours that it was going to be turned into a house, or maybe even a shop, which seemed quite absurd. The people running the pub suggested that I should invest in it, and it suddenly occurred to me that if the pub wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have a pub within walking distance.”

The timing of May’s investment, made in 2020, was not ideal. “We bought it just before lockdown, which was a really bad business decision, but a deal is a deal, and we’d already agreed to buy it,” he says.

Despite the difficulties of operating a hospitality business during the Covid-19 pandemic, May says that The Royal Oak is “popular” at present. Even so, he claims that the pub is not a big money-spinner: “It still doesn’t really make a profit; it makes enough money to maintain itself.”

Essential trifecta

May attributes the positive reception the pub has received from punters and critics alike to it being well-run, as well as having the “essential” trifecta of “nice staff, decent food and good bogs”. As for his own role at The Royal Oak, he remarks: “I go in there most weekends and make all sorts of constructive suggestions, and they don’t take any notice because I don’t really know anything about running a pub.”

Although he jokingly pleads ignorance, May has become something of a voice for the pub trade – though a dissenting one at that.

Shortly before he met the drinks business, he appeared on BBC’s Newsnight current affairs programme, where he commented that pubs were “not monuments”, and that they had to adapt to continue operating. “I got a lot of flak for that, with people saying that their pub was brilliant, but it closed down due to costs,” May says. “All businesses have to deal with rising insurance and rising energy costs, people having less money to spend – it’s true of pubs, restaurants, garages, local shops. So I still maintain that if a pub doesn’t survive, it probably wasn’t meant to.

“It’s like people complaining that this should be a Christian country – well, none of you go to church. People want these things – like the church, the postman who knows your name, the pub – to be there because they reassure them. But, if you don’t use them, they’ll disappear,” he argues.

Continuing the religious comparison, May describes running a pub as a “proper calling, like being a priest”, and suggests that many of these businesses fail because the owners do not realise what’s involved: “It’s incredibly hard work, and the hours are anti-social.”

He adds: “Pubs have to modernise, and the ones that move with the times survive. I don’t think the pub will disappear – there will be a continuing cull, but it won’t go altogether.”

Not a connoisseur

Although May is a self-professed beer drinker in pubs and a white wine drinker at home, it is actually his gin brand, James Gin, that has brought us together.

“I like gin,” he reassures me. “I’m not a connoisseur, but I love a gin and tonic and drink a lot of them while on The Grand Tour trips.”

Much of the gin he drinks on these international sojourns, he “steals” from co-presenter Richard Hammond.

But it’s one thing to be an “enthusiast” about drinks – it’s another to set up a drinks business of your own.

The root of May’s interest in being a gin brand owner, and not just a drinker, can be traced back more than a decade. “A lot of it goes back to when I did the wine show with Oz Clarke years ago. We did a British series, Oz and James Drink to Britain, in 2009, and went to Plymouth Gin and played at making a basic gin, and I thought it was really good fun – a lot of it tasted absolutely terrible, but occasionally out of the four or five we made, we got one that made us think ‘that’s not bad’.”

Gin venture

It was in 2021, during a gap between The Grand Tour specials, that May teamed up with Hugh Anderson of Downton Distillery in Wiltshire to make some gin to serve at The Royal Oak.

Downton Distillery produced 1,000 litres of gin, or around 1,430 bottles – too much to sell entirely through The Royal Oak, so May turned to social media.

“We thought it would be a good laugh and made a YouTube video about it, and it sold out within a few days, so we made some more and kept going,” he says. “There wasn’t really a plan.”

The flavours in the James Gin range are certainly unusual – American mustard, petrichor (the smell of rainfall on hot earth) and the original, Asian parsnip. “The Asian parsnip idea was because I thought parsnips are very British, and everyone in Britain likes Asian food and spices, so I thought we would combine the two, almost like a parsnip curry side dish,” May says. “We fiddled around with it and did quite extensive tasting sessions, and I thought it was very interesting. A lot of gins just taste of lemon to me really – there’s not that much depth.”

Exotic botanicals: James Gin flavours include American mustard and Asian parsnip

The follow-up flavours have also proved successes, often selling out within a day of each new batch’s release.

Given the nature of ingredients used as botanicals – from beetroot to mustard seeds – you might assume that May, who hosts his own cookery show, Oh Cook!, for Amazon Prime and wrote a cookbook of the same name, would be excited about the gastronomic potential of the gins. However, he says that these are not spirits designed for food pairings: “We started making a video on it, but we decided it was bollocks, so we gave up. I don’t really drink gin with food.”

Small and honest

Despite the clear demand for his product, May does not harbour world-conquering ambitions for James Gin. “If Diageo turned up and said ‘here’s £10 million for the brand’, which is bugger-all in the drinks business, I’d be tempted, but I quite like the fact that it’s small and honest, and just a hobby,” he explains. Continuing his savvy use of social media, in May 2024 he established a YouTube channel, James May’s Planet Gin, dedicated to the brand.

But some of his gin experiments turned out to be non-starters.

“We’ve revisited it several times, so it’s fairly safe to say that it just doesn’t work,” May says of one idea, a gin flavour called Gasoline Dreams. “It was supposed to smell like freshly-pumped unleaded petrol, which has a slightly rotten mango quality to it. I thought we could make a gin that smells like it, so that everyone who is anti-electric car could say they had a petrol gin.

“But the fact is that all the things that make petrol smell like petrol are lethally poisonous, and there are no real substitutes in the natural world. We added some Riesling concentrate, but it didn’t really work. We got to the point where it was a bit petrolly on the nose, but it was stale petrol, and it just wasn’t good enough – it didn’t have the nice, smooth, fruity quality.”

Branching out

May is also cautious about branching out into other spirits beyond gin.

“We talked about it, because rum was becoming very trendy when we started, and we considered making a Scottish neutral spirit, so whisky before it becomes whisky, and we were going to call it ‘swisky’, but we decided that would push us beyond the point of a novelty enterprise,” he explains.

“We didn’t think this through because we weren’t expecting it to turn into a business.”The fact that he had called the business ‘James Gin’ also meant “we would have had to call any subsequent products in the range ‘James Gin Whisky’ or ‘James Gin Vodka’ – and that would be very confusing.”

As for breaking into the low and no alcohol category, May is sceptical of nonalcoholic gins, suggesting that they taste more like “cordial”, and comparing them to “a non-cheese cheese board”.

“I’ve said it before that alcohol is God’s apology for making us self-aware, and if you take that away, there’s really no point in having a drink – you might as well have a cup of tea.”

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