Daytime pints, Noel Redding, a short-legged dog and booze made for other people

Abundance: Sunday 6 July 2025

Many years ago, I was just back in Devon’s cidery bosom after an autumn of grape picking in France followed by a selection of trains and buses taking me slowly through the top of Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, the islands, and into Turkey. And then a 63 hour coach from Istanbul to Dusseldorf that’s a story for another time.

The first pint of the dark stuff, of which I’d been dreaming for a couple of months, was in the company of a friend who told me a family friend had offered him (and a few of his pals) the use of their house in south west Ireland for the festive season. I should mention it was a lunchtime pint, on which there is a conversion rate (1 daytime = 2 in the evening?): the resulting enthusiasm had us booking half a dozen tickets to see The Waterboys in Dublin¹ without really checking how far that was from southwest Cork .

The best part of 24 hours in the back of a van, broken only by a bouncy ferry trip, had us from Devon to Castletownshend, a tiny village a few miles south of Skibbereen. The village had a pub, and that pub sold Guinness: all would be good. A poster on the door announced Noel Redding was playing on Boxing Day lunchtime. It couldn’t be the Noel Redding, Jimi Hendrix bass player, we thought, but the bar man confirmed it was he.

To cut a long story not especially short, Noel Redding appeared at Boxing Day lunchtime and played not the bass but the guitar, and sang along with his wife, producing a noise that was the inverse of what we were hoping. Lunchtime ran into the evening, mercifully without the singalong soundtrack for too long: a bottle that looked as if it might’ve been unearthed from the silt that had collected around a 16th century wreck appeared.

This was poitín - the famously pokey home-distilled spirit that, according to pre-internet legend, could send you into a parallel reality, strike you blind, or bring on a state of incapacity so complete that anything could and probably would happen to you. I never drank spirits - I loved Guinness and cider too much - but I tried a shot, this much is polite, bringing on an early variant of Detectorists lemonade face.

The morning of Boxing Day Boxing Day had me feeling not overly special. A headache galloped towards luminous by lunchtime and pulled at me like an unwalked hound well into the evening.

Why does this come to mind? Two reasons: this week I noticed a flash of gold in the grass, and closer inspection revealed the source of the gold as a clutch of Cinnabar moth caterpillars.

Are they not beautiful. Their preferred lunch is ragwort, and thanks to an irregularly ovate unmown patched of grass, a few tall stems have established, and very welcome they are. Happily, there are no cattle or horses in the garden as they are famously sensitive to the poisons carried by ragwort’s leaves and tall daisy-like flowers; a wealth of pollinators - it is one of the most widely attractive plants to butterflies in the UK - enjoy their presence, and the Cinnabar moth caterpillars munch enthusiastically through the ‘poisonous’ leaves. Immune to their effects, the caterpillars eat from the leaves’ underside, assimilating the toxins and themselves becoming unpalatable.

Why the connection with poitín? Three years ago, I was backed into a narrow tube of an MRI scanner where a sensory assault signalled a 22 minute scan in search of the cause for 9 migraines in 6 weeks. This is a good way to find out to what degree you are claustrophobic. The brain scan found nothing (bdumtish). The same day, a friend told me that he hadn’t had a migraine since giving up spirits. Having just bought a bottle of (my favourite) Lagavulin, this seemed like an almost talismanic moment: laying down my new bottle against the prospect of another fuzzy-eyed four-dayer felt like an offering to the gods that would be unlikely to work, but at the very least it would leave me free to enjoy it after the next migraine, safe in the knowledge it wasn’t the cause. Three years and a month later, that bottle remains untouched. And so I remember that poitín and its incendiary impact on my bonce and realise it was a first sign of what was to come.

I drink little these days. I recognised that my enthusiasm for it was not matched by the good it did me, that perhaps it was rather too keen on drinking me rather than me it, and that the speed with which I am drawn to empty a glass is inversely proportional to the wisdom of doing so. I promises me happiness, while stripping it away. I am not, like the Cinnabar moth, immune to its poison.

That doesn’t stop me making alcoholic infusions. I get pleasure in the doing, the little of sips, and the pleasure in the sharing. And now is one such time.

I’ve written previously about my love of walnut leaves - the scent they leave on rubbing fingers is up there with baby’s scalp, frying fenugreek, lemon verbena and applewood smoke - and one day I shall make something that captures their lemon, orange, sherbet scent, but today, it’s the immature nuts that have found their way into my basket.

Diaconocino

In Emilio-Romagna, the splodge of Italy that’s shaped like a short-legged dog sniffing the backside of San Marino on the east coast, there is a tradition of harvesting walnuts early, before the shell develops, to make a liqueur called Nocino. In many ways, it is a Mediterranean sloe gin, with as many variations as there are makers. Sadly, I have been unable to prevent myself christening my own DiacoNocino².

In Italy, the nuts are picked in early July and usually I’d give it an extra fortnight in the UK, but this has been an exceptionally hot spring into summer so there’s no need to wait³. It would be unusual to not find a tree in a public place in a city or town, so keep your eyes open and ask around if you don’t know of one.

Historically, the local not-necessarily-legally-produced alcohol is infused by an uneven number of nuts: never mind the poitín, Waitrose vodka will do perfectly.

Wear gloves: walnuts are so ridiculously tannic they’ll colour your fingers like you’ve had a lifetime of Woodbines.

29 (or 31) green walnuts
1 litre vodka
500g sugar
1 stick of excellent cinnamon, cracked
a generous length of lemon verbena, leaves only
a vanilla pod, split lengthways

Wash, dry and quarter the walnuts. In a 3 litre jar, stir the sugar into 200ml warm water to dissolve it. Add a third of the vodka and stir like crazy until the sugar has dissolved. Add all the other ingredients. To keep the walnut quarters submerged, part fill a freezer bag or similar with water, seal and ease into the jar making sure no vodka overflows - if it threatens to, empty the bag of a little water.

Let it rest for a month, inverting to encourage things to mix then strain the liquid into clean bottles. By Christmas, it will have turned into a syrupy, dark, sweet-bitter aromatic liqueur: feel free to dilute with a little water if it is too strong, as one of the pleasures of making it it that it varies each year.

1. It was a four and half hour drive rattling around in the back of that van to Dublin on the afternoon of the gig, followed by a four and half hour drive back to Castletownshend after the gig…every single moment of which was worth it to see them at their peak

2. I included a version of nocino in A Taste of the Unexpected and A Year at Otter Farm and they both won Food Book of the Year, but I don’t like to mention it

3. To test whether the walnuts are too far developed, take a skewer and push it through the centre; if it makes it out the other side it means the shell hasn’t developed yet, you got there in time