Cabalva single estate perry, a traditional celebration drink.

Perry is pear cider's older, quieter cousin - an alcoholic drink made not from cooking or eating pears, but from a handful of small, sharp, often unglamorous perry pear varieties. It's been made in the orchards of the Welsh Marches - Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and the border counties - for hundreds of years, quietly, without much fuss, by people who simply liked drinking it.

Older than champagne - and arguably its ancestor

Champagne houses like to tell a story about a monk called Dom Pérignon discovering sparkling wine in the 1690s. It's a good story. It's also, by most modern accounts, not quite true, even within the wine trade itself. Dom Pérignon was, if anything, trying to stop his wine from fizzing, not start it.