Keeping it real | 9 April 2011

Italian food is about simplicity and seasonality, and in Sicily spring brings the fragrant lemon harvest – eagerly awaited in one corner of Devon. Hattie Ellis takes a trip to the mother country with a pioneer of real lemonade

Do you remember when lemonade used to be just that harshly fizzy clear stuff you bought in big plastic bottles? Now you can find a fragrant, sweetly-sharp drink that’s the soft yellow of a summer’s evening. Often called Sicilian lemonade, it is similar to what you’d make at home. Add a slosh of gin, vodka or rum and it’s something else again.

One of the best Sicilian lemonades is made by Luscombe Drinks in Devon, the pioneer of the trend, starting back in 1997. The story behind this drink takes you deep into the heart of a Sicilian village where, in 1969, an artistic couple and their young family arrived. Julian David had been a teacher at the progressive school Dartington Hall. In the days when gap years were just starting, he wanted to take students into the heart of the Mediterranean. The family set up home for four years in Scopello, a fishing village at the end of a long, winding road up in the north-west corner of the island. The village was a world apart, with one phone line and a dozen mules to work the fields. Here they hosted the students who helped set up a pottery and worked with the villagers on their smallholdings.

Nearly 30 years later the couple’s son, Gabriel, went to live in Sicily for another four years. Returning to the UK to head his father’s struggling Devon-based cider company, he decided to expand the business to sell upmarket organic drinks with no concentrates or additives.