Sign up to IndyEat’s free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releasesGet our food and drink newsletter for freeGet our food and drink newsletter for freeMy 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 s***,” he says – cordials might feel more playground than Palace. Christopher’s wants to change that: a grown-up, 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.open image in gallery‘The key was to not be over-sweet’ (Christopher’s Cordials)The seed for Christopher’s was planted about two years ago, when Fenwick invited Parker Bowles for a pint and turned up with “amazing artwork” and a simple pitch. “Look, we have Belvoir and Bottlegreen, but they use concentrates. Why can’t we make a really, really high-end British cordial?”At the same time, both men kept hearing the same complaint from friends cutting back on alcohol – including the Queen. “There are so many people who don’t drink for reasons of health, religion, whatever,” Parker Bowles says. “Again and again and again we heard, why is it always elderflower? Why is there nothing else? So we thought, well hang about.”For Parker Bowles, the issue was personal as well as professional. Known for decades of wine-soaked restaurant reviews and “proper Friday lunches”, he’s candid about age catching up with him. “I can’t do what I used to do, those endless long lunches. I can do a proper Friday lunch about once or twice a month. That’s it.”Now he sets rules. “I try not to drink on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. If I can make it to Wednesday, I’m particularly smug. As I get older, my body just can’t take it. The hangovers are much worse. The existential fear the next day is much worse.”This isn’t just another celebrity endorsement, he insists – “not that I’m a celebrity!” – but more of a passion project, with perks. “This is very much mine and Jolyon and George’s [Ward, one of the partners] business… but we actually drink them. So it’s really easy to wax lyrical and bang on about them.”He’s also noticed the wider cultural shift. “There is a new generation and an older generation who don’t see drink as a day-to-day thing, which is a good thing. There’s more interest in health and mental health, in understanding ourselves and understanding our body.”Drinking every day is not good for us by any stretch of the imagination. But I love the taste of wine, of beer, cocktails, of spirits. So I’d never want a time when alcohol disappearedHe’s sceptical of miracle cures – “we all want the magic pill or injection that will make us thin” – but applauds the growing focus on wellbeing. “Our concentration on mental health is a fantastic thing. I’ve never done exercise, apart from dancing all night, and now it really makes a difference. I try to go to the gym. I’m the sweating 50-year-old among all these hard-bodied 20-year-olds, but I do feel it clears my head.”For him, moderation is the goal. “Drinking every day is not good for us by any stretch of the imagination. But I love the taste of wine, of beer, cocktails, of spirits. So I’d never want a time when alcohol disappeared. But I think there’s a good balance between enjoying a drink or two, and having a couple of days off.”Christopher’s, then, is part innovation, part nostalgia: flavours like gooseberry and lime, Sicilian lemon and redcurrant, and blackcurrant and blueberry – sexier than squash, but rooted in fruits every Brit recognises.For Parker Bowles, the key was always acidity. “The key was to not be over-sweet” – a pitfall of the no- and low-alcohol market. “Acidity, for me, is the key of all cooking and all drinks and everything to get the balance.”The gooseberry and lime plays to that instinct. “I love gooseberry, but it’s a rather unloved Great British ingredient. They’ve got just the right amount of acidity. So we put gooseberry with lime… the gooseberry and lime has a little bit of lemongrass, a little bit of sea buckthorn, and they act like, I suppose, anchovy with lamb. You don’t actually taste them, but the buckthorn adds a little bit more acidity, and you get the little bit of lemongrass, but that’s really just bolstering up the flavours.”The Sicilian lemon and redcurrant is equally sharp. “It’s really refreshing and sharp; it has a really good jolt of acidity. It doesn’t get cloying or over-sweet.” It’s also the one his mother favours most. “I couldn’t speak for the King, because I would never do that,” he grins. “But my mum’s a big fan.”open image in gallery‘It’s the same price as an average bottle of wine, but we feel that the contents are anything but average’ (Christopher’s Cordials)Then there’s the blackcurrant and blueberry, which his children – Lola, 17, and Frederick, 14, whom he shares with ex-wife Sara – have dubbed “posh Ribena”. “It’s deep purple, and you have a bit of rosemary and a bit of chamomile in it. It’s supposed to perk you up. It’s not just that over-sugary, over-sweet boringness, and they all have tons and tons of fresh juice in, no concentrate at all.”And unlike some rivals, Christopher’s doesn’t try to masquerade as something it’s not. “This is very much not in the sector of Seedlip”, the world’s first distilled non-alcoholic spirit. “We’re not taking the booze out of anything. We’re not saying this is like a vegan sausage or anything like that. This is very much a non-boozy drink. It’s not trying to mimic alcohol. It’s a cordial standing by itself.”Versatility is part of the appeal. The cordials are best with sparkling water – Parker Bowles swears by San Pellegrino, “because it has that slight saltiness” – but they’re also being shaken into cocktails, folded into sauces and even rippled through ice cream.At £9.95 a bottle, £28.50 for a pack of three or £161 for an 18-bottle “pick your own” pack, Christopher’s sits firmly at the premium end. Is it just squash in a William Morris frock?Parker Bowles is surprisingly clued up on the economics. “If you’re buying a nice posh chicken and that’s going to cost 24 quid, which is bloody expensive for a chicken, yet you know why: free range, slow grown, better flavour, better welfare. Same with us – tons of fruit juice, British where we can, bottled beautifully. About 20 drinks a bottle, so 50p a glass. Compared with £35 for Seedlip, under a tenner feels fair.”He shrugs. “It’s the same price as an average bottle of wine, but we feel that the contents are anything but average.”While we don’t know if King Charles is sipping the stuff, or whether it’s stocked in the Palace, the idea actually originated there. “Jolyon is also a First World War historian, so he was, of all places, at some garden party at Buckingham Palace, and was sitting with a whole lot of surviving First World War veterans and they were talking about a cordial that one of the officers had made during the war from the local berries around the Somme in the summer, and it was called a Christopher.”That stuck. “It was a very tenuous link,” he laughs, “but Christopher has that warm, soft Englishness about it. And there have been some great Christophers.”open image in galleryTom Parker Bowles with his mother, the Queen, in 2015 (Getty Images)Nick Strangeway, one of Britain’s most inventive bartenders, has even created a roster of serves named after some of them: The Man with the Golden Gun, Christopher Robin, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, The Hitch for Hitchens, even Foyle.For all the branding and positioning, Christopher’s is essentially a nostalgic revival. The cordials nod to Ribena and Robinson’s while distancing themselves from elderflower monotony and syrupy mocktails. They’re aimed at drinkers who still love alcohol but want something sharper, fresher and more grown-up on the days off.And Parker Bowles himself? Still a drinker – just more measured. “I have Martinis. I like a Gibson most of all. But really, really dry as the Sahara and with Tanqueray, or Sipsmith, or Hepple. Also a really good claret or a really good Bloody Mary.”Cordials may never replace wine or gin in Britain’s cultural imagination. But thanks to Parker Bowles, they might just step out of the school lunchbox and back onto the grown-ups’ table – with a royal nod of approval to boot.
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‘My mum’s obsessed with it’: Tom Parker Bowles on Christopher’s, cordials and cutting down on booze
