A very special sparkling perry

Our old, lichen-wrinkled Victoria plum tree has lost its last leaves. It’s a clock for me. The clocks go back, and yes that marks the season change with surgical brutality. But it’s the day I look out my study window and see sky, iron-latticed iron sky, through the bony fingers of this stoical fruit tree I have come to love, that I know it has started. Winter.

Winter. I close the door, light the fire, turn inwards, back away...