Recipe

• 50 ml lemon-flavoured gin

• 50 ml prickly pear liqueur

• Half a lime

• ½ tsp sugar

• 50 ml red wine

Mix the first four ingredients, then shake with ice and pour into a wine glass filled with extra ice. Pour the red wine over a teaspoon so that it floats on the top.

I was offering drinks round on New Year's Eve, and Steve flamboyantly asked for a "funky-wunky cocktail". After a short discussion we decided it might be fun to actually invent a cocktail with that name, and so this was born.

This is a great example of the formula for a sour cocktail. If you don't know what to make and need to improvise something, you just mix "strong, sour, sweet" – in this case a spirit, a citrus juice and a liqueur. And I very much used what was to hand, selecting the funkiest ingredients as I went along (the prickly pear stuff is quite fruity and unique). This gives us a basic sour cocktail, but to up the funk a bit I decided to add a red wine float (see the New York sour and Triple sour). This is why I added a little sugar to the cocktail part: to make it a bit denser and keep the layers more separate.

The result is curious, surprising, and entirely fits the name. It's a bizarre set of ingredients so I can't imagine I'll do it again, but as an exercise in improvisation I'm very pleased.