Christmas book competition: the results!

To win a copy of Victoria Moore’s new book How to Drink at Christmas, I asked you simply to tell me what your favourite Christmas drink was, in whatever manner you chose. After much deliberation, bribery and a steward’s enquiry, I can reveal the winning entries.

Mr Giles Culpepper was quick to jab in his response: “My favourite Christmas tipple is a tumbler half full of red wine topped up with Scotch, commonly known as Queen Victoria’s Tipple.” As an afterthought he adds, “Go easy on the Scotch unless you’re keen on an evening of utter oblivion.”* Well, if you can’t embrace oblivion at Christmas, when can you do it? This makeshift and appealingly desperate-sounding drink is nicer than it sounds. I tried a half-and-half mix using a bottle of Primitivo I had open and some Johnnie Walker Red Label and it was actually rather unpleasant—somehow more astringent than either of the component ingredients. But when I increased the wine to two thirds it suddenly began to make more sense. I’m not sure if it is supposed to be drunk on the rocks but I doubt it would do any harm.

A Secret Martini, made using a miniature
shaker that I picked up from Shaker & Co:
very handy for one-person cocktails

Our next winner is Mr Maximillion Conrad, who submitted a cocktail recipe with accompanying haiku:

Fucking Christmas... Shit!
The New Sheridan Club, ahh...
Brings me Chappish joy.  

Secret Martini (a good name for the New Sheridan Club spy-themed party, no?)
3 oz. Gin
1 oz. Lillet Blanc
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Shake with cracked ice (preferably to the rhythm of "Jingle Bells") and strain into a chilled martini glass. I find it to have the perfect balance of inducing forgetfulness, and making conversation flow effortlessly.

Related to the Vesper Martini (from the James Bond novel Casino Royale: 3 parts gin, 1 part vodka, ½ part Lillet, lemon twist), this drink does away with the vodka, and doubles the presence of the Lillet Blanc. The Vesper was originally made with Kina Lillet, which contained quinine and would have had a bitter edge, like the red vermouth Punt e Mes; as here, many modern bartenders add Angostura to replace the lost bitterness, though of course this also adds colour. (As an alternative try Cocchi Americano or China Martini.) I knocked one up using No.3 gin and the resulting cocktail was relatively sweet, both from the sweet orange in the gin and the orangey sweetness of the Lillet.

Ms Sadie Doherty submitted this intriguing blend:

My favourite Christmas tipple would have to be 1 part Goldschläger (or Becherovka if you can get your hands on some—I’ve only had it once but it was lovely), 1 part ginger wine, 1 part lemon juice, shaken with plenty of ice and topped up with fiery ginger beer. It doesn’t really have a name so I will call it a Gingerbread Fan for want of better pun.

A Gingerbread Fan made using Becherovka.
That garnish is a slice of ginger, by the way,
not a potato crisp

Ginger and cinnamon flavours make this a very Christmassy drink, though the hearty dose of lemon counters the sweetness of the liqueur and actually makes it sharp and refreshing. It’s not too alcoholic, if that should prove a factor. Becherovka is indeed not that easy to get hold of here (though ubiquitous and dirt cheap in the Czech Republic).

Ms Elaine Myburgh’s offering comes with an elaborate origin story:

It was a treacherously dark and stormy night, with howling winds and shrieks galore, when two aspiring mixologists called on help from above to create a drink so potent as to bleach all their nefarious deeds from their fellow mens’ memories.

Out came the Sailor Jerry’s rum to warm their cockles, the port to put hair back on chests that had long forgotten what it felt like to puff up in pride, the orange flame to hearken back to days in sunny splendour on far of shores. 

Stirred slowly over ice, with the bartender’s version of Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble softly repeated four times to hide the true potency of this devilishly delicious concoction it was then finished of with a dash of fresh OJ and a cinnamon stick to stir as garnish.

Sailor Jerry’s is not my favourite spiced rum—too sweet with cloying vanilla for me—but in the right combination it can work. Elaine has so far not given me the actual recipe, but it clearly involves Sailor Jerry’s, port, orange juice plus the cryptic reference to the “orange flame”. Sounds a bit sweet, but certainly Christmassy.

A Sloe Gin Fizz

The final prize goes to Ms Claire Wallin for reminding us that Champagne and sloe gin are an excellent combination, with the dry acidity of the wine balancing with the sweetness of the fruity spirit. “The mix of bubbly goodness with what I class as (almost) one of my five a day is a perfect
seasonal treat!” she says.

As it happens this drink is in the very book that you have been competing for, as a Sloe Gin Fizz, mixing one part sloe gin to three parts sparkling wine. I would probably use less sloe gin than this, but it depends on the intensity and sweetness of the brand (or homemade special) you have to hand.

Those are our five winners, though honourable mention must go to Mr Rob Harrison, who introduced me to the Gin Basil Smash, a drink invented at Le Lion in Hamburg and which went on to win Best New Cocktail at Tales of the Cocktail in 2008, but of which I don’t think I was aware. Not only that but he presented his recipe in limerick form:

“Hendrick's smash”, a delectable sin:
Take lemonade, ice, to begin,
A fistful of basil,
A lemon to dazzle,
Then fill to the top with some gin!

You can see that Rob is firmly in the Hendrick’s camp, though I notice that Jörg Meyer, the inventor, doesn’t specify a brand. Interestingly Rob uses lemonade, whereas most recipes combine gin and basil with sugar syrup and lemon juice: take a good handful of basil, muddle it in a shaker with half a lemon to extract the juice from both. Then add 20ml sugar syrup and 60ml gin. Shake it all vigorously with ice and double strain into a glass filled with cracked or cubed ice. The result is quite green.

However, in the final analysis, interesting as this cocktail is, I decided it wasn’t Christmassy enough to make it into the winning five! Sorry, Rob.

Thanks to all who entered, and a Merry Christmas (with the emphasis on merry) to all our readers.

* Kingsley Amis’s advice for making this drink is: “The quantity of Scotch is up to you but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler.”

Cocktails for Bonfire Night

Right from when I noticed, earlier in the year, that Guy Fawkes night (5th November) fell on a Saturday I had the idea of doing a themed Candlelight Club party, somehow creating cocktails with smoky, fiery flavours.

A few ingredients immediately leapt to mind. First was Chase’s Oak-Smoked Vodka, which is produced in limited editions (now on its second batch) by allowing oak smoke to infuse into the spirit for about a week in a specially designed smoke chamber. It’s an extraordinary taste—and not to everyone’s liking, as my partner observed when he wrinkled his nose and said it smelled like bacon. (I didn’t tell him that bacon vodka is a well-established concept.) But it’s also quite a subtle flavour. I tried various vodka cocktails, such as one called a Hot Tub which combines vodka with pineapple juice and prosecco, but the results weren’t very nice. It works fine in a Bloody Mary, but that’s quite a feisty cocktail for a delicate vodka (and many people are convinced it’s really a breakfast drink). So I decided it perhaps needed showcasing in a simpler recipe and ended up with a Collins/Fizz arrangement and hit on the idea of adding a bit of fruit body from sloe gin, a seasonal and rather English beverage.

Heart of Oak
2 shots Chase oak-smoked vodka
1 shot sloe gin (I used Hayman’s)
½ shot lemon juice
½ shot sugar syrup
soda water
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with soda water.

The smoke is not at all puckering or cloying: it’s a subtle background dry waft, almost meaty, indeed like smoked duck or bacon. The sloes are again calm, dry and rather ethereal compared to, say, the blackberries in cassis (see below), with a hint of spice. With the pencil-lead juniper from the base gin this ends up a little like smoked game with a sloe and juniper jus. The lack of cloyingness to the fruit makes this a lean, refreshing number; just the thing to follow a country ramble in the late autumn afternoon—with a suggestion of dinner to come!

In the spring I was introduced to a ballsy product called Fireball, made from Canadian whisky blended with a cinnamon liqueur. Despite its name it’s not really hot, but has a vague pepperiness to its cinnamon spice. But for the name alone I thought it was worth including. One of the brand’s signature serves is a cocktail called Dub Dub’s Apple Pie, cleverly combing the cinnamon of the whisky with apple, a classic pairing. But Fireball is a pretty in-your-face flavour, with a medicinal quality that reminds me of surgical spirit (or rootbeer, depending on your drinking history), so I replaced half of the Fireball with calvados to calm it down a bit while emphasising the apple:

Hot Apple Pie
1 shot Fireball cinnamon whisky
1 shot calvados
1½ shots apple juice
1 shot lemon juice
10ml egg white
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake all ingredients vigorously and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

Even in this reduced quantity, the sweetness of the Fireball offsets the lemon juice pretty well, though some might want to add a bit of syrup. It is a lot like baked apple with cinnamon!

There is a well-established simple cocktail called a Smoky Martini which adds a small amount of whisky (most likely a smoky Islay malt or a blend with a high smoked malt content) to a normal Martini (often omitting the vermouth). In a party environment I tend to steer clear of cocktails that are basically all spirit, so I combined this idea with the Abbey/Bronx direction of lengthening it with a small amount of orange juice, plus a sweet-sour mix of sugar syrup and lime juice to give it body.

Smokini
1½ shots gin
½ shot Islay malt whisky
1 shot orange juice
½ shot sugar syrup
¾ shot lime juice
Shake all ingredients and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

The flavour of this cocktail will obviously depend on your choice of whisky. With Bowmore it is fairly subtle but with Laphroaig it’s more up-front in its smoky, peaty, iodine character. But even using Laphroaig it makes a drink that Mrs H.—who basically doesn’t like whisky—declared to be very tasty.

Everyone seems to be using tea in cockails at the moment, so inevitably the idea of smoked lapsang souchong tea came up. There is a cocktail called a Smoky Old Bastard (on the grounds that it is a bastardisation of an Old Fashioned) that combines Bourbon, lapsang and maple syrup. I had some maple syrup knocking around so I gave it a try. I found it a trifle thin so I experimented with fruiting it up a bit using apricot (which I always think goes rather nicely with bourbon) and plum bitters.

Bonfire of the Vani-Teas
2 shots bourbon
2 shots cold lapsang souchong tea
1 shot crème d’abricot
½ shot lemon juice
¼ shot maple syrup (or regular syrup)
2 dashes plum bitters
Shake all ingredients and strain into a rocks-filled glass

The apricot liqueur adds sweetness so you don’t need much syrup—in fact you probably don’t much notice the fact that it is maple syrup, so I’m sure simple syrup would do just as well. The tannins in the tea dry it out, so it’s quite a refreshing drink, not hefty.

Finally, I wanted to include ginger, and ended up adapting a recipe from the 1940s called El Diablo. This is tequila-based, but I wanted something that better evoked the pagan horrors lurking in the English hedgerow, so I used gin instead, along with the ginger beer, lime and crème de cassis of the original, plus some of Monin’s extraordinary gingerbread syrup, mainly because it seemed seasonal.

The Horned One
2 shots gin
¾ shot crème de cassis
1 shot lime juice
1 tsp (5ml) gingerbread syrup
Ginger beer
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with ginger beer.

The gingerbread syrup can be very overwhelming and, even with just a teaspoon, it and the blackcurrant are the dominant flavours—and they go together very well. (I see that Gabriel Boudier makes a blackcurrant and gingerbread liqueur, so I am clearly not the only person who thinks this.) To be honest you aren’t much aware of the gin and it would probably work well with white rum too.

I had just acquired some of Master of Malt’s chipotle (smoked chilli) bitters and was intrigued to try adding some, to turn up the heat of the ginger (some ginger beer has chilli in it), while again adding some smokiness, but Mrs H. persuaded me that it might be nice to have at least one cocktail that was neither hot nor smoky, so I let it lie. For now. Mwah, hah, hah hah…

Sloe! sloe! Quick, quick—sloe!

DBS braces himself for the task ahead. He looks suitably daunted

Sloe gin is not something I think about most of the time. But while testing some serving suggestions with Beefeater’s Winter Edition gin I tried one cocktail that called for sloe gin as an ingredient. I happened to have a miniature of Plymouth’s version and it got me wondering how many firms made it and how they compared.

I suggested a tasting to DBS and, being a compulsive taxonomist, he jumped at the idea. Considering that one manufacturer told us that most of the people he knew who drank it actually made their own, it was surprising that we managed to unearth 17 different products to try. (There at least another three which we have not yet tried.) All the producers were happy to supply samples (well, all except Gordon’s, but since theirs is the mostly widely distributed perhaps they felt they didn’t need the publicity)—in fact I think many were delighted that anyone even knew about their product.

Traditionally you harvest sloes, fruit of the blackthorn and related to the plum, and infuse them in gin with sugar, sometimes adding cloves, cinnamon and/or almond (though apparently a well-made sloe gin extracts an almond-like flavour from the sloe stones). Pick your berries in October or early November when they are most ripe, and prick or cut them. Folklore has it that this should be done using thorns from the bush itself—and if you must use a metal knife or fork, be sure it be silver. Arrrr. I have heard that the sugar is not just for taste, but is necessary early in the procedure to extract the full flavour from the berries. Add the sloes in a half-and-half mixture with gin, along with the sugar, and shake daily for the first week, then weekly for a month or two. Sounds like the idea is to have it ready just in time for Christmas, though I’m told the flavour will be better if left till the next Christmas. Even after the liquor is strained off, the leftover berries can by used to make “slider”, cider infused with post-gin sloes, or indeed to make sloe jam.

(Left to right) Will Sprunt, me, Fleur de Guerre, Compton-Bassett, David
Bridgman-Smith, Robert Beckwith, Sara Bridgman-Smith

What you end up with conventionally is something that balances red berry fruit, tartness, sweetness, dry tannins from the skins and warmth from the spirit. But if making your own is such a traditional ritual (even Prince Phillip does it), how would these commercial products measure up?

We assembled a team of seven: David and Sara Bridgman-Smith, Fleur de Geurre, Compton-Bassett, Robert Beckwith, Will Sprunt and myself. In order to sample this many different products between seven of us would mean 119 glasses which our venue, Graphic, weren’t able to free up, so we sourced some plastic shot glasses. (I’ve no idea what the “correct” vessel for tasting sloe gin is, but at least this way it was a level playing field.) Perhaps we should have had some homemade sloe gin to compare against, but we would have needed to think about that months earlier—and it wouldn’t really have been much use to you, the reader, as you could not have gone out and bought that anyway.

Of course it’s hard to keep a memory of 17 flavours in your head, and David had an idea to split the samples into four tranches, giving a favourite out of each, then seeking our favourites of the favourites (slightly flawed—what if the best and second best of all turn out to be in the same tranche?). We also paused halfway through, to wrap our tongues in hot towels and massage them back into shape.

Made it to the end! And my notes are still relatively legible

But it quickly emerged to me that there was another way of subdividing the samples. Some seemed clearly “classic” in style—specifically Plymouth, Hayman’s, Gordon’s and Marks and Spencer—with a deep red colour and aiming for a traditional balance of the flavours described above. Then there was a second group which I described as “ginny”—Hawker’s, Sipsmith, Foxdenton and Sloe Motion. These were the ones that clearly wanted you to remember that this was originally gin. (I gather some commercial products just use neutral grain spirit and bypass the actual gin stage; which seems valid enough to me. I suspect that the traditional reason for starting with gin is that that is what was to hand. It might be interesting to home-make batches side by side using gin and vodka.) These high-gin examples unsurprisingly were also the ones highest in alcohol. (Overall the sloe gins ranged from 17.6% to 30% ABV, but most were around 26%, evidently the point which most manufacturers felt offered the right balance.)

The remaining samples, which I dubbed “artisanal”, went in various directions. Some were light and fruity, others sweet, others heavily spiced. I’ll save my individual tasting notes till the end and cut to the chase—which drink was best? Attempting to rank all 17 in order of preference was too big a task for a mortal palate, but we felt that tasters would probably gravitate towards certain favourites, so we asked everyone to name their top three, in order. Awarding three points for a first place position, two points for a second and one for a third, we were able to come up with a reasonably scientific scoring system. It’s also worth noting that between seven people picking three sloe gins each, only ten products actually featured at all. Out of the total of 42 points awarded, here is how they were allotted:

GOLD MEDAL
Plymouth
(7 points)

SILVER MEDAL
Hawker’s, Sipsmith and Bramley & Gage Organic
(all with 6 points)

BRONZE MEDAL
Foxdenton
(5 points)

6th: Juniper Green (4 points)
7th: Jack Cain (2½ points)
= 8th: Sloe Motion (2 points)
= 8th: Bramley & Gage Original (2 points)
10th: Gabriel Boudier (1½ points)

See below for the also-rans that received nul points.

If you’ve not tried sloe gin there are, as you can see, plenty to choose from (though I note that the most widely available, Gordon’s, didn’t even make it into the top ten). I admit it’s not easy to get anything other than Gordon’s, though Majestic do stock Sipsmith’s. Follow the links to individual sites to find out how to purchase.


Full list with my tasting notes (in the random order in which we sampled them):
1. Moniack Sloe Liqueur (17.6%, £12.99) A light, orangey colour, more like a rosé wine. Cider nose. Sweet, light palate with a thin, simple taste.
2. Bramley and Gage Sweet Sloe Gin (26%, £11.49 for 35cl) B&G actually make three different sloe products. This is darker in colour than the Moniack and with a richer nose, of red berries. Also sweet, though better balanced. Almonds on the nose and palate. Herbal finish that, as Will points out, is reminiscent of certain Eastern European liqueurs and bitters.
3. Plymouth Sloe Gin (26%, c. £17.95) Darker but with a quieter nose and a drier, tarter palate. Balanced and straightforward. The website makes a song and dance about how traditional it is and the pure Dartmoor water that goes into it, but in fact the sloes come from Poland.
4. Sipsmith 2009 Vintage Sloe Gin (29%, £20 for 50cl) Sipsmith make their vodka, gin and sloe gin (in that order—the one from another) in a garage in west London, in the first new copper still to be built in London for about 200 years. They make a point of the fact that this batch was bottled last year. I categorise this as a gin-led product (hence the high ABV). Indeed it has a strong juniper “blue note” and makes the Plymouth seem quite almondy by comparison. I got a hint of pipe tobacco.
5. Bramley & Gage Sloe Gin (26%, £11.95 for 35cl) Unsurprisingly like no. 2 but not as sweet. Almonds less pronounced. Clear herbal nose with cinnamon on the palate. Expected to like it more.
6. Lyme Bay Sloe Liqueur (26%, from £13.23 for 35cl) Smells of juniper but is actually quite sweet and orangey on the palate. Also has some dark brown note, like coffee, perhaps.
7. Gordon’s Sloe Gin (26%, from £15.99) Citrus nose, balanced palate—almonds, alcohol, berries. Will mentioned that it tastes of used tea bags—in a good way—and once the idea is there you can definitely taste an Earl Grey element.
8. Hawker’s (28%, about £17.50) Apparently this was the first sloe gin to be made commercially, to a recipe dating back to 1790. Although it is made by Desmond Payne, Master Distiller for Beefeater, it actually uses Plymouth gin as its base, but its sloes (unlike with Plymouth’s own sloe gin) are wild-picked on Dartmoor. I think this is a cracking example and once I had tasted it it remained my favourite. It is a ginny sloe gin (hell, I guess I just like the taste of gin) but I these elements balance well with the sloes and the whole is better integrated than the other gin-led examples.
9. Juniper Green Organic Sloe Gin (26%, £22.25) Uses wild sloes from Romania. Citrus nose, with a hint of fermenting pears, and elements of cinnamon and coffee on the palate. Popular round the table.
10. Hayman’s Sloe Gin (26%, £17.29) An example of the classic style. Smells of mulled wine and oranges, with a hint of maltwine (i.e. unaged whisky, and a distinctive element in genever). Well balanced, but not hugely interesting. By comparison the M&S version seems more weighted towards citrus and the Plymouth seems chocolatey.
11. Bramley & Gage Organic Sloe Gin (26%, £13.27 for 35cl, £22.47 for 70cl) Uses a different (organic) gin base from the normal B&G version. Smells faintly of ink or boot polish, but not necessarily in a bad way. Almondy, but less so that the non-organic version.
12. Sloe Motion Sloe Gin (26%, £15.95 for 35cl, 22.95 for 70cl) These people are sloe-crazy, making sloe brandy, sloe whisky, sloe vodka, sloe chutney, sloe truffles. They probably live in a house  built from compacted sloes. Perhaps surprisingly, the sloe gin falls into the gin-led category. Hints of lavender.
13. Gabriel Boudier (25%, £17.55) Made in Dijon, in France. Very soft and quite sweet. Perhaps suffered from coming late in the list, as there is more going on than you at first think. Will sums it up as “kind of pleasant”, which sounds like damning with faint praise.
14. Marks and Spencer Sloe Gin (26%, £10.95 for 50cl) A classic style, with an almond element but balanced, with no angles or corners. Nice enough.
15. Foxdenton Sloe Gin (29%, £18.95) “Recognisably Different Sloe Gin”, they say. They’re right in the sense that, even among the other ginny sloe gins, this one tastes as if they really didn’t want to contaminate their lovely gin with any more sloes than absolutely necessary. Rather unintegrated. Doesn’t work for me though others like it; it’s DBS’s favourite.
16. Cowen Sloe Gin (26%, £15.29 for 50cl) Smooth, subtle, herbal, with coffee notes. OK.
17. Jack Cain’s Sloe Gin (30%, £24 for 70cl, £4.95 for 5cl) The driest and strongest sample here. Cain was a 19th-Century entrepreneur, smuggler and illicit distiller in Northumbria and this is made to an “old family recipe”. Quite a hardcore drink, more like a sloe bitters, seemingly with no added sugar. But intriguingly complex, with elements of vanilla, chocolate, coriander. Probably quite a useful cocktail ingredient; I'm definitely going to try a Sloetini. You can buy miniatures online but if you want a full bottle you’ll have to get it in person from the makers or from Fenwick’s in Newcastle.

Beefeater shows its winter coat

Beefeater Winter Edition

If the traditional gin style is like a sober suit and tie, then recent years have been like one long Dress-Down Friday, with new brands popping up that have the confidence to leave the house in whatever outlandish get-up they feel expresses their personal style. To extend this creaky fashion metaphor, Beefeater are now bringing seasonality into it as well—in the summer they produced a Summer Gin, flavoured with floral notes of elderflower, hibiscus and blackcurrant, and they have now unveiled their Winter Edition, enhanced with Christmas spices and complete with a label depicting a strangely timeless couple ice-skating on the frozen lake in front of their stately home. (Well, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without that, would it?)

If you’re expecting a Brockmans-style flavour overhaul (i.e. something that doesn’t taste like gin) you’ll be disappointed. Tasted side by side with regulation Beefeater, this is still recognisably in the Beefeater house style, but with an additional mid-note warmth of orange and cinnamon. There’s nutmeg and pine in there too. You could argue that by extending the flavours in these fat, jazzy areas, taking emphasis away from the starched-collar juniper high-notes, they are actually acknowledging the direction of some of the modern gins while not abandoning their traditions. Like tentatively partnering your sober suit with an exotic tie someone gave you for Christmas. (OK, enough with the clothing metaphors.) I like it. Tasting it neat I think actually like it better than the normal all-seasons version.

Beefeater suggest a few mixed drinks to showcase their new formula, so I decide to give a couple of them a try.

Winter Kir Royal. That's not my
house you know.

Winter Kir Royal
25ml Beefeater Winter Gin
25ml sloe gin
100ml Champagne or sparkling wine
Pour the gins into a Champagne flute and top up with the fizz. I used cava and some Plymouth sloe gin that I had to hand. The recommended garnish is a blood orange twist. It’s a good idea, though dominated by the sloe gin; you know my feelings on Champagne based cocktails, and some experimentation showed that reducing the sloe gin to around 10–15ml gives a subtler, more complex and better balanced drink by allowing the wine to make its presence felt.

A burglar's-eye view of
the Hot Apple Gin

Hot Apple Gin
1 part Beefeater Winter Gin
3 parts warm apple juice
Pour gin into a toddy cup or mug, heat the apple juice in a pan and add to the gin. Garnish with a cinnamon stick and grating of nutmeg.
Just the thing to curl up with when you come in pink-cheeked from some crisp outdoor activity like hunting or clearing snow or stealing potatoes. Since I seldom leave the house except to slide into some urban watering hole, I felt a bit of a fraud, but it’s a nice combination. I used a phial of artisanal apple juice purchased at a farmer’s market at great expense, fresh and foodlike on its own, but added hot to the gin it produced a rich drink that really brought out the spiciness of Beefeater Winter even without the added cinnamon stick.

Beefeater Winter Edition is packaged in a matching box and they’re obviously hoping we’ll be buying bottles of it to stick under the Christmas tree for each other. It  will be available for a limited period this winter from Selfridges, Harvey Nicks, Fortnums and Harrods for about £18 a bottle.