What better way to toast this great gentleman’s birthday than with a bottle plucked from very the cellar he built two-and-half-centuries ago?

Today would be the 310th birthday of Laurence Sterne — the 18th century’s most eccentric author — whose old abode in North Yorkshire is central to Broken Clock Vodka’s own plot, being the home of the idyllic country garden where we gather the classic botanicals for our recipe.

Sterne moved here to the village of Coxwold in 1760. He was the village clergyman but had secretly found fame writing the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, a sensational and rather controversial book which he first published under the pseudonym, ‘Yorick’.

His books are a masterclass in Georgian-era innuendo, comedy digression and razor-sharp wit, and having moved into the parsonage, Sterne’s friends swiftly christened his new home ‘Shandy Hall’; the word shandy being a dialect term for ‘wild, crazy, odd and merry.’

So there’s little doubt that a good few bottles were uncorked during his time living here, and while we raise a glass to Laurence today, we like to think that his noble spirit still pops down into the cellar occasionally to seek out a snifter — and preferably an awfully english tipple too.