In at no. 6, it's...rhubarb wine!

I like alcohol. No surprise there.

I also like trying bizarre types of alcohol that may or not make me blind...So far, I can still see.

Today we have been sipping on some rhubarb wine that we bought yesterday on Lindisfarne (a beautiful little island off the coast of Northumberland that is only accessible by car during low tide). It [the rhubarb wine] is quite an impressive concoction. As it first enters your mouth, it tastes quite like a standard dry white wine. Then you get a strong kick of rhubarb, and for a second or so your mouth fills with the mellow, gooey taste of gently cooked rhubarb, all mushy and tart and spectacular. Then that fades and the back-taste is, surprisingly enough, very winey. That said, it's a bit sweet and rhubarby to actually get pissed on, but a bottle between 3 or 4 would go down very nicely, I'm sure.

This has enthused me to try many of the other bizarre fruit wines and liqueurs that our sceptr'd isle has to offer - when we next go back to Lindisfarne, I may return with a carful of mad bottles from St Aidan's Winery (Black Beer and Raisin Wine, anyone?!). In the shorter term, however, I have been inspired to come up with a few charts ranking my weirdest, favourite, and least favourite alcohols (Channel 4, sign me up!). Unsurprisingly, there is a bit of an Eastern European bias here. This is largely due to the fact that I have spent an unhealthily large proportion of the last 10 years lurking around Eastern Europe. It's also because people there will drink anything :)

My top 10 unusual alcoholic beverages
1. Frank's homemade zubrowka
Zubrowka, or bison grass vodka, is the tipple of choice in Poland. It is also popular in Belarus, where I had possibly my best drinking experience ever. In Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, home-brew (samogon) is almost a national religion. It's a slightly risky one, admittedly, so let somebody else try it first, but good home-made stuff is quite fantastic. On my one trip to Belarus, I was invited to the home of a semi-local called Frank (it's a long story), where he treated me to quite the most amazing zubrowka, in quite amazing quantities. I feel asleep on his sofa a very happy man.

2. Medovukha in Novgorod
Medovukha is a honey beer. Not like Waggledance though, which is perfectly pleasant but is essentially ale with a touch of honey. This is actually a properly honey-tasting beer. The only thing that I can think to compare it to is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes in liquid alcoholic format. It used to be very common in Russia, but apparently isn't much so now. However, the Detinets restaurant in the heart of Novgorod, where I mis-spent many an hour, still makes and serves it and it is pretty much worth a flight to Novgorod by itself.

3. Chacha
Not a dance. Chacha is a Georgian grape brandy or vodka. It sounds like it should be lethal, but actually it's really damn nice. Usually the bottle has a grape in the bottom of it - chock full of alcohol, it's a particularly tasty way to finish off a fantastic night's drinking.

4. Armenian mulberry vodka
If chacha sounds like it should be lethal, tutovka (mulberry vodka) actually is. Ok, I exaggerate, but only slightly. This stuff really kicks. It's not made in large quantities and anything you can buy is likely to be fake, so you need to rely on being befriended by Armenians who will insist on getting you drunk on their proud tipple. It's fantastic. But it really knocks you out.

5. Honey and Pepper vodka
Not as exotic to me as it should be, because unofficially it's the Ukrainian national drink, but medova z pertsem is like the country itself - first you don't know what to think, then after a little bit you get used to it and quickly grow to love it, but if you overdose on it then you feel a bit queasy. Well, possibly. At any rate, anybody who tries it needs about two seconds before the warm feeling spreads right across their body and they realise that drinking vodka without a mixer isn't as crazy as it sounds.

6. Rhubarb wine
I've just described it - see above.

7. Raki
Ok, so maybe this isn't quite so exotic, but I was fortunate enough to spend a pleasant evening drinking raki on a Turkish beach last September. Like many things in life, in the right context, it just makes sense. Sometimes, you might look at that cloudy aniseed broth and flinch, but at the right place, at the right time, it's damn marvellous.

8. Slivovitz
One of those ones that you can spell in a hundred ways, this plum brandy is apparently ubiquitous in South Eastern Europe - though I haven't really travelled much there so I can't be too sure. Initially, I was a bit suspicious of slivovitz because of a bad experience with tuica (see below), but inevitably, over time I've come to accept its greatness and intend to travel round the Balkans dousing myself in it some time soon.

9. Lindisfarne mead
I first went to Lindisfarne on a family holiday when I was a wee lad. I can't remember drinking any rhubarb wine that time, but I definitely remember the Lindisfarne mead. If medovukha (see above) is a proper honey beer, then Lindisfarne mead is a proper honey wine (slightly fortified, I believe). It's rather sweet, so you can't drink it in large quantities, but it tastes great - and hey, if monks have drunk it for thousands of years, it can't be that bad, huh?

10. Ladyboys!
Not strictly a drink, but worthy of this chart nonetheless. As some of you may know, I am an Alan Partridge obsessive. In the episode Watership Alan, Alan ends up drinking 'ladyboys' - lager, with gin and tonic and Baileys Irish Cream chasers. One happy night a few years ago in Golders Green, my brother, Justin and I ended up drinking Ladyboys. They're nowhere near as bad as they sound...

My top 5 normal alcoholic beverages
1. Whisky
Particular favourites at the moment are Talisker, Laphroaig and the Glenlivet. Just so you know.

2. Beer
Need I say more? Well, probably not, but I will. I'm particularly fond of ale, especially pale ale, at the moment. Can't remember any names, but the one I had recently at the Hillsborough Hotel in Sheffield was divine. Other recent winners include ESB in Seattle - just for the surprise of discovering a half-decent ale when I hadn't been to the UK for months, and had therefore had no decent ales - and Ukrainian white beer Chernihivske bile, which is just as good as Hoegaarden but a fraction of the price

3. Wine
Dry, particularly red. Sorry for being pretentious, but I'm a big fan of Georgian wines, particularly mukuzani and saperavi, so it's a shame they're very hard to get hold of in the UK.

4. Rum and coke
Maybe not that spectacular, but some of my earliest drinking experiments involved rum and coke - indeed, it was the first drink that my dad ever bought me. Still tastes fine.

5. Bailey's
I'm not ashamed to admit it. There's nothing unmanly about liking Bailey's - it's just being human.

No, no, no!! My top 5 unusual alcohol experiences that sucked

1. Cloudberry liqueur
A couple of years ago I was hanging around in Helsinki airport and decided, on a whim, to buy some cloudberry liqueur. Unfortunately, it was foul. Maybe I just didn't know how to drink it properly, but I managed about three sips before I decided that it wasn't for me. It sat in my cupboard for months before being poured down the sink (we had no paint that needed stripping).

2. Tuica
Never been there, but apparently tuica is the national drink in Romania. There was a tradition in my old organisation to bring back strange alcohol from different parts of the world. At one point, a clear-out was going on and I inherited a bottle of tuica. I couldn't drink it. It tastes not dissimilar to slivovitz, but worse. Maybe I was just unlucky with the bottle. I'm sure if I stumble round Romania, I shall appreciate a half-decent glass of it in context and it'll seem fantastic, but this put me off it for quite a while.

3. Jaegermeister
When living in Germany a fair few years ago, I was going through a bit of a down patch and drinking more than I should have done. The low, however, was trying to drink Jaegermeister straight. Since then, I've discovered that another herb liqueur, Becherovka, tastes very pleasant when mixed with tonic - maybe the same is true of Jaegermeister. But I can't be bothered to find out.

4. Amsterdam Navigator
God knows why, but on my 19th birthday in Novgorod, one of the teachers at the school I was working at gave me four cans of Amsterdam Navigator. I tried to drink it - I mean, it was free alcohol - but God this stuff is awful, it makes Tennents Super taste lovely. As one of the reviewers on the beer site linked to above says - vraiment cheap!!

5. Buckfast
I'm sure someone can explain it, but it's always struck me as bizarre that half of Scotland enjoys getting drunk on Buckfast, a 'tonic wine' made by monks at the other end of the UK. Quite frankly, the Scots can keep it. I had another way of getting drunk incredibly cheaply from an improperly young age. And so, to my final thought for the night:

The Special Award for Services to Teenage Drunkenness
...goes to Lambrusco Bianco. God that stuff is foul. But it's really cheap, and when we were growing up it seemed like off-licences only stocked it so that 15-year-olds could get pissed on it. No doubt today's 15-year-olds are a choosier bunch. Or they drink alcopops. And who could blame them?