With our Christmas Tincture, all your drinks can smell like Christmas!

For me, nothing evokes the joy of Christmas like the smell of a Christmas tree. Well, apart from the smell of the Christmas box that stores my parents’ decorations for eleven months of the year, though that has been building up year on year since I was a kid, and I haven’t worked out how to bottle it yet.

But Christmas doesn't really start until you can come home to the fresh sap and pine smell of a real tree, so I spent some time thinking about how I could capture that smell in a drink.

The easiest way to capture aroma in a drink is to create a tincture – an alcoholic extract of a plant, or an intense and high (80-100%) proof alcohol infusion. So once you’ve purchased your Christmas tree, relieve it of one good-sized branch and reach for the high proof vodka. Combine the two and you're good to go.

The finished tincture can then be used to rinse the inside or stem of a glass or as a light spritz over the top of a finished drink – don’t over do it though, as some types of pine tree can be poisonous and in particular, should not be consumed by pregnant women!