AT THE centre of Athens in the old Plaka lies Vrettos, established for a hundred years, an Aladdin’s cave of lurid coloured liqueurs with equally exotic ingredients: carnations, cinnamon, morello cherries and masticha. Like some old fashioned apothecary, with Lily the Pink’s medicinal compounds.
Perhaps, nothing epitomises the Greek love of liquor better than the way they drink liqueurs; those white spirits infused with the flavours of herbs, flowers, nuts and fruit. It was at our first party in Nicosia that Cypriot friends arrived not with bottles of wine, but plastic water bottles. We looked confused. “It’s not what you think,” they laughed. It certainly wasn’t. The bottles were filled with homemade ‘zivania’, from their village, high in the Trodos: it hit the spot.
Like the Greek drinks of ouzo, tsipouro and the Cretan raki, zivania is made from ‘pomace’ the residue of grapes, stems and seeds left from the pressing for winemaking. In a waste not want not attitude, this second fermentation produces that strong spirit often served chilled or in shots to accompany small plates of local delicacies such as lountza, the smoked pork loin and loukaniko, the small village sausages, and which epitomises hospitality. For it has taken me a while to realise that liqueurs, once the domain of monks, made for medicinal purposes, and then later by the women of the villages, have become throughout Greece a symbol of welcome and succour, to be given freely, as a symbol of hospitality, and to generate good health and well-being.
On the small island of Chios they produce Masticha, one of the three EU appellation liqueurs in Greece. This small Mediterranean tree only grows on the island and its resin, used in chewing gum, is much prized for its properties to aid digestion and cure peptic ulcers.
Throughout Greece, restaurant owners will bring small glasses of the clear, sticky drink with the bill, to thank you for custom. Often they watch with hawk eyes as you drink it and then applaud, as if in relief, that you will leave healthier than you arrived.
Back in Plaka, keen for me to taste all the fluorescent flavours, I am given, not the bright blue of the Curacao, or the brilliant green of peppermint, or the deep red of rose petals, (hard to imagine there are no colourings added), but a murky unappetising brown. Tentoura: the liqueur of Patras, made from cinnamon and cloves and carnations. It tastes like cough medicine, but I am told that on a cold winter night the sailors will down it to clear their nasal passages and old ladies will drink it with milk to keep their bones warm.
And it reminds me of a day in September as a child in Sussex, when we gathered the deep brown sloe berries from the blackthorn hedges, and my grandmother would give us silver forks to prick each berry to release its juice, before she put it into large bottles of gin with copious sugar to be hidden deep in the pantry until Christmas. “What is it?” I would ask. “Medicine,” she would reply, and with a smile add, “a little of what you fancy always does you good”…
