CORDIAL INVITATION

With his new range Christopher's, Tom Parker Bowles aims to offer something a cut above to Britain's non-drinkers. And he's already converted the Queen

- By Hannah Twiggs

“My mum’s obsessed with it.”

Tom Parker Bowles is talking about his mother’s drinking habits. Nothing unusual – except his mother happens to be the Queen. Camilla, he insists, is “obsessed” with the Sicilian lemon and redcurrant flavour of Christopher’s, the cordial brand he co-founded with his old friend, the artist Jolyon Fenwick.

If you grew up on Robinson’s orange squash or Ribena - “since they’ve taken lots of the sugar out of Ribena it’s gone a bit shit,” he says - cordials might feel more playground than Palace.

Christopher’s wants to change that: a grownup, properly made alternative for those cutting back on booze, or at least those who don’t fancy being caught sipping Ribena in middle age. The bottles are smart enough to sit on the table in place of wine, the flavours sharp and complex, and the name itself has a backstory that takes us - with some irony - straight back to Buckingham Palace.

This isn’t Parker Bowles’ first food business. “A few years ago,” says the 50-year-old, “I did pork scratchings with my friend Matthew Fort. We wanted to do posh British pork scratchings. We thought, if you can do it for crisps, you could do it for pork scratchings.”

The trouble was the pork wasn’t British at all - but German, Dutch and Danish, as headlines gleefully pointed out. The strapline, “made from 100 per cent British pork rinds”, didn’t survive scrutiny. Parker Bowles walked when sourcing free-range British pigs proved impossible.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that with Christopher’s, he’s careful to stress provenance. “We’re using tons and tons of fruit juice. And obviously, British where we can; our gooseberries come from Herefordshire.” Lessons learnt: get roasted once over foreign pigs, you make damned sure your gooseberries aren’t German.