In the run-up to the holidays, Alane picked up a bottle of Borsci, a digestif that I had never heard of but that some old Italian ladies were raving about in the liquor shop. We brought it upstairs on Christmas Eve but forgot to open it after th meal. We dug out the bottle over the weekend and finally had a taste.

The stuff was perfectly awful. It tasted a bit like a benzine eggnog, with a burning-tire finish. I thought perhaps the stuff had gone bad. Or that a cabinet-maker had washed his lacquer-brushes in the solution.

Fortunately, it ate a hole in the side of my paper cup before I had to finish my portion. Which reminded us of Christmas Eve 1987, when Mike Yee and I stopped to see Guido and his mom on our way to Brooklyn. She brought out a bottle of wicked grappa and poured out a small glass for each of us. Mike sipped it, nodded his head as if to say "thank you!" but as soon as she wasn't looking he poured it out into the potted plant.

A few months back we finished off the last of that grappa. Cork and all, it still tasted as bad.