In the drink

The sloe lane

There are two things I never have enough space for in my flat: books and bottles. They tumble out of every cupboard you open and I have to purge them every few months, just to keep the situation from reaching crisis point.

But I've come to think of this as a good thing, because it means that I have become exceptionally critical about what might be worth keeping. With sloe gin, which I tried for the first time recently, I wasn't sure which way it would go. Everything about sloe gin sounds delicious. The gin, obviously, is a good thing. Then there are the sloes used to infuse it - the tiny, black, astringent fruits of the blackthorn bush which grows wild in hedgerows. And yet . . . might the reality have all the appeal of the dandelion wine my dad used to make in the 1970s? My fears were heightened by the fact that my parents have recently taken to making their own sloe gin, using Gordon's as a base.

The best way to drink sloe gin is neat (it is not as alcoholic as ordinary gin, with an ABV of 26%), in a small glass, so that's how we first tasted it. There were two samples. One was purply, intensely sugary and tasted confected and sickly, like a syrupy cough remedy - that was the Gordon's. It went straight down the drain. The other had more russety tones, like clotting blood. A waft of bitter almonds and damsons (the sloe is a member of the plum family) came off the glass. Enough sugar had been added to take the edge off the rampant astringency of the fruit, but not so much as to domesticate it. It was delicious - grown-up and very addictive. This one was made by Plymouth (£9.99, from Asda and Safeway).

Mum, whose excellent tastebuds I had borrowed, pronounced it even better than her homemade version (the Gordon's, apparently, was much worse). There's no question that this earns its house space - but when should you drink it? The best thing is to have a tiny glass with a crumbly English cheese at the end of a meal. It can be added to champagne to make an intriguingly flavoured cocktail. I also tried it with tonic - but not too much - which showed up the Gordon's even more than when it was neat. Plymouth, which gathers sloes from Dartmoor National Park, recommends mixing it with bitter lemon to make a Long Pedlar, a traditional West Country drink.

The flavours are particularly suited to English game (Mum uses the gin-steeped sloes to make stuffing for pheasants), so a spot in the pan when you're cooking - and a measure for the cook, of course - would not go amiss, either.