Tipple tattle

Dust off the Dubonnet: old-fashioned drinks- cabinet staples deserve to be moved from Christmas past into Christmas present believes Will Hosie

- Will Hosie

CHRISTMAS is beckoning and with it the joys and anxieties of spending time with our loved ones. Praise be, then, to the drinks cabinet, perhaps the carpenter's finest invention. It has existed in some form or another since alcohol was bottled, but only in the way we know it today since the 1920s, when home cocktail-making became fashionable.

Almost invariably, familial drinks cabinets contain half a dozen mysterious tipples. What are they for? How did they end up in there? Nobody seems to really know. Yet, here they are, behind the Tanqueray and the Talisker, nestled between old decanters and still-boxed novelty corkscrews: Dubonnet, Bénédictine, Chartreuse. Perhaps they were a gift—or even a re-gift—from guests. Perhaps they were bought on special offer, in a fit of festive spirit. Either way, they're most likely to elicit a wry smile from connoisseurs and those who remember older relatives sipping them from mismatched crystal glasses.

However, the appeal of these lesser-spotted drinks isn't only nostalgic. Too often relegated to retro-curiosity status, they are all masterpieces of the distiller's art, complex, storied and brimming with character. They can be enjoyed as aperitifs, digestifs or mixed into classic or original cocktails, such as the Japanese, created in 1860 by bartender Jerry Thomas on the occasion of the Pacific island's first diplomatic mission to the US: two ounces of brandy, half an ounce of orgeat syrup and four dashes of Angostura bitters.

Selecting which hidden gem to focus on is a difficult task: do you go for the most obscure or the least? At COUNTRY LIFE, we go for a cobble. Perhaps you have the below in your cabinets already (yes, right there... a little to the left... next to the vermouth). Or you don't —in which case, you may want to stock up.

The Monastic Masterpiece