Never one to shirk his duty, Kevin Gould braves war-torn Croatia and samples maraschino, a liqueur with an ancient and noble history.
Imagining that our chic Italian friends would jet to impossibly exotic holidays, we were thrilled to be invited to 'The Islands'. Dreaming of semi-clad natives with cappuccino complexions, we listened to tales of sunsets over the archipelago, of swimming with dolphins, and of crystal-clear waters that supported 400 varieties of fish and crustacea. We couldn't wait! We would sail, eat well, make love, watch the stars and wear linen jackets over our shoulders like Tony Curtis in The Persuaders.
Finding out that our destination was only a couple of hours' flying time away was a surprise; being told that we were off to Croatia was, frankly, a worry. Our one impression of the region focused on desperately sad news images of the conflicts, and we were reassured only when we discovered that a famously cowardly friend (who considers Bambi to be a violent film) was also planning to go.
With more than 1,000 islands to choose from, we based ourselves in the ancient town of Zadar, perfectly situated on the Dalmatian Coast and home to Croatia's oldest university. With its architecture ranging from pre-Roman pillars, through ninth-century churches to Iron Curtain concrete, Zadar has great charm. It is also a working port, with smacks and trawlers and ferries which ply the coast and bring in Italians from Ancona. And even the most recent attacks of 1991 failed to harm one of the town's great assets, the Maraska distillery.
We found Maraska quietly shouting its importance with the best location in town, opposite the harbour (ferry trips across in a rowboat, five pence one way) and facing west over the enchanting islands of Ugljan and Rivanj. Built in 1812, and looking like a palace fit for an Austro-Hungarian prince, the factory of Maraska was traditionally the largest employer in town, and the biggest customer for the area's bumper crop of brown cherries. Some time before the Greeks were history, a seafarer brought back some stones and trees from the shores of the Caspian Sea, which then thrived in the rich, red, sheltered soil around Zadar. This variety, with its forgettable Latin name, is richer, sweeter and more intensely fleshy than any other cherry. By the 16th century, Dominican monks were turning its juice into the liqueur we now know as maraschino.
The cherry orchards were substantially destroyed in the last aggressions, but now maraschino is in production once more, due to an enlightened programme of re-planting. The factory gives saplings to families in the area, thus guaranteeing the families an income and the factory its raw materials. Ripe fruits are harvested with notched sticks and sent immediately to the distillery, where they travel in state along terrazzo and cherry-wood parquet corridors. The kernels are removed and reserved for later, when they are crushed and distilled into kirsch; only the pulped fruit, the tender first centimetre of stalk and a few leaves are left in oak vats to ferment.
Every function in the factory is performed by hand, which is as much a testament to 50 years of communist influence as to any adherence to the artisanal ethic. As enjoyable as it was to see labels straight out of the 1920s hand-applied with a pot of glue and a paintbrush, the enduring memory of Maraska was the raffia room. A dozen women in regulation white coats and flowery head-scarves sit chatting in a circle on squares of foam. They plait reeds from the Slovenian border straight onto the maraschino bottles in the same pattern that decorates the roofs of Zadar's churches. In the 20 minutes it took to hand-weave a bottle, there was time for us to enjoy the expansive sea view and an excellent Turkish coffee.
The filtered, fermented, pale pink maraschino liqueur is fruity, slightly oaky and delivers a playful kick so loved by Napoleon Bonaparte that he toasted his victories with it. British royalty got squiffy on the cherry for centuries; we were constantly reminded that the factory is proud to have received a visit and a wholesale order in 1887 from the then Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. Today, Maraska sells its product to a number of German, French and Italian manufacturers who encase it in chocolate for the after-dinner market, or bottle it with inferior cherries to sell to the unsuspecting in Christmas hampers. In the pursuit of academic research, we drank maraschino in the form of frozen shots (very acceptable, and modern, too), with tonic (very refreshing) and in a succession of increasingly bizarre cocktails, which caused a certain amount of memory loss.
As a reviver to tired fruit salad, maraschino is Mr Motivator; when poured liberally over chocolate ice cream, it had us purring with pleasure; and with an Italian flourish, we learned how to rinse out the last of our espressos with a generous slug of the stuff. And following on from the Tequila Sunrise, we honoured one of the local islands by inventing the Sunset over Sit, which involved injecting chilled maraschino into an orange via a hypodermic needle - two or three bites had us speaking fluent Croatian.