Ponderosa Ponderings

Growing up in Flagstaff, one experiences something most Arizonans don't: all four seasons, in your body. Crippling snow gives way to extreme drought, a climate that shouldn't suit much of anything, and yet the ponderosa thrives in it, dominating the high desert with its high crowns that can reach up to 300 feet.

Arizona's reputation is one vast desert, but nothing captures the state's magnificent range better than the saguaro paired with the ponderosa: cactus and forest, an hour apart, where the Sonoran Desert abruptly meets the Colorado Plateau. The very symbol of the scenic drive (highly recommend!)

Before we ever take visitors to the Grand Canyon, we take them to the trees. No trip to northern Arizona is complete without burying their nose in the deepest crack of the orangest pine you can find and waiting to see what they say. It's usually somewhere in the dessert aisle: chocolate, butterscotch, Mexican wedding cookies, toffee. Difficult to grasp, impossible to forget.

These are the tallest and most armored trees in the state, with bark thick enough to survive fire, wood dense enough to earn the name ponderosa, heavy, in Latin. Imagining the scent, you brace for something dangerous. Tar, maybe. Smoke. Instead you get a bakery. It's like a tall, dark, cloaked cowboy turning around and holding out a doily-lined plate of powdered cookies. Scientists still can't fully agree on why. The leading theory is vanillin, released as the bark's lignin slowly breaks down, with terpenes warmed by the intense sun playing a part too. What's certain is that the sweetness is earned and not incidental: it's the struggle made visible, a product of oxidation, offered up by the oldest trees, the ones that have outlasted decades of fire, drought, blizzard and definitely stand tall.

If it grows together, it goes together. From the first experimental batches of what would become Suncliffe Gin, ponderosa pine bark has been in every recipe, infused alongside the same native juniper berries it's always grown beside. It lends a powdery-vanilla, resinous-butterscotch note that rounds out our gin and amaro in an hard to describe, yet undeniably delicious way, and it's been core to our DNA ever since.