A NEW BUZZ

Good riddance, muchmaligned mocktails. The world’s best bars are serving up alcohol-free drinks that are inventive, good-looking and just plain delicious.

Iraise my champagne flute to make a toast. My drink is vibrant, floral with honey and stone fruit, lightly effervescent. Made in Buckinghamshire, UK, it’s a kombucha honey jun – a fermented tea (or botanical fizz) that’s certainly intoxicating, though not in the usual sense. It’s just one of many libations available at Hakkasan Mayfair, where I’m tasting the results of two years of worldwide research and development with Christine Parkinson, its international head of wine. We’re working our way through the restaurant’s Orchard List, a radical and eclectic collection of soft drinks. They don’t have a drop of alcohol in them, but all have notable complexity, depth and character and are made with ingredients of impeccable provenance.

This is next-generation thinking: recalibrating drinking in a culture where most people are drinking significantly less or choose to abstain completely. It is estimated that in