16 October

Of all the unofficial "National Holidays" to emerge from the USA, National Liqueur Day is surely one of the highlights of the calendar.

We owe much to monks and the ancient monasteries of Europe for the origins of liqueurs and the processes still used to make them. Today we're celebrating the role liqueurs play in cocktails with a Tanner's Amaretto Sour, putting amaretto in the spotlight.

World Food Day

For more than 30 years, today has been World Food Day. Why? Because an estimated 645 million people worldwide still face hunger, and undernutrition remains associated with nearly half of all deaths among children under five. Tragically, the world's poorest and most vulnerable communities are also among those hardest hit by climate change, despite contributing the least to the problem.

Today, the UN wants us to think about sustainable food systems and how we can all make a difference by changing daily habits and making simple decisions. We'll be pondering this over a Breakfast Club cocktail.

Oscar Wilde's Birthday

Son of a knighted surgeon and his artistic wife, Oscar Wilde was born on this day in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went on to write novels, plays, and poems, and ultimately scandalise the world.

Mr Wilde was also something of a fan of absinthe. He observed that "Absinthe has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world." He also described the intoxicating effects of the green fairy. After the first stage of ordinary drunkenness, Wilde says, you enter the first stage of hallucination, where you see "monstrous and cruel things", and then the second "where you see things that you want to see".

We are toasting one of history's greatest wits with a Martini Special, a grown-up Martini with an absinthe edge that we borrowed from Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. Or, you may consider a Dorian Gray, named for Oscar Wilde's most notorious literary creation, more appropriate.