A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to walk to the northern tip of Gozo: one of those summer walks on small Mediterranean islands where, after a while, your feet barely seem to be touching the ground any more. It was hot, so I was wearing few clothes and plain sandals. Two infinite blues formed an anti-landscape: the sea, with its distant sussuration and quiet churn, and the sky, a grand empty vault into which the oven of the sun spilled its heat. The limestone beneath my feet was already thust high, like a gigantic diving board. I felt as if I was walking lightly into emptiness.

Drunken fennel and cascading capers on Gozo

Along the route to emptiness, there were plants to look at. Gozo is the sister island of Malta (the two lie to each side of the 36th parallel, south of Tunis, south of Athens): quieter, more agricultural, but fundamentally as dry, rocky and arid. The wild thyme was in flower on the uplands; capers cascade from the dry stone walls and the rock crevices (what we eat are the flower buds, though the flower itself is a beautifully feathery affair, streaked with dashing purple); the wild fennel was already setting its seed.

I love that scruffy, yellow plant with its drunken lean, scraggily growing taller than a man in half a season in order to escape the clutches of the parasitical snails which encumber it, then throwing its seeds into the air like some biblical farmer before sculpturally dying and sticking around for a season or two afterwards to haunt its offspring. The wild, bitter fennel is supposed not to have the gentle aniseed scent and flavour which characterises sweet fennel – but it does. Grab a seedhead, rub it in your hands, and you’ll see.

That scent appeals more to me each year. It is a keystone aroma for the entire Mediterranean – most evidently via pastis and ouzo and raki, but more subtly, too, via the perfume of the Vermentino (Rolle) grape variety – and via mastic, too.

I was on Ithaca last summer. The concept of shopping is one which normally fills me with horror, but there is an exception: shops on small Greek islands. I don’t want to call them supermarkets or groceries or general stores since they elude those glum definitions. Warm, scruffy, chaotic, run by gentle widows with a shaky grasp of arithmetic, they are the true heirs of the agora: you will find there everything you have ever wanted or could ever want in order to ensure a happy life. And sure enough last summer I found a tiny bag of something I have been searching for for years: mastic. Captain’s brand: 5 grams for E1.32.

I opened it. I’m rather suspicious of fanciful notions about what ‘the past’ must have smelled like, because it must generally have smelled of sweat, faeces and putrifaction. But I can’t quite shake off the notion that the palaces of Constantinople and the fortunate of the entire Byzantine empire smelled of mastic – which is to say part-resin mixed with a hint of anis, a freshening note of mint, a tease of tar plus the exoticism of frankincense. As a smell it is both fresh and profound, multilayered, and packed with obscure emotional force. When I smell the emptied packet of my Captain’s mastic, I imagine a library on Mount Athos with its windows open on a summer day, bringing the smell of the Mediterranean itself across the pines and virgin scrub and mingling them with old wood and old books.

Mastic is resin, of course: the resin of plants of the Pistacia family, and especially Pistacia lentiscus. Terroir is colossally important in its cultivation: the best comes from (and only from) the southern part of the Greek island of Chios, which lies just down the sea road from Constantinople. One day I will visit Chios and its mastichochoria, its mastic villages, and marvel at its ‘crying trees’, and find out a little more about why there and only there is so propitious for them. Each tree produces no more than 200 g a year.

For over 2,000 years, people have been chewing mastic resin: it is the original chewing gum, and the word lies at the origin of our verb ‘to masticate’.
Chew on this Chewing mastic is a strange sensation. The lumps of resin are like little crystals of incense, ready to burn in a thurible. They feel very hard when you first put them in your mouth. You then crunch them; they splinter. The warmth of your saliva and the enzymes it contains then transforms the hard incense into a firm, chewable ball – but it still tastes like incense or resin at first, gradually becoming a little lighter and more floral as you proceed, and guarding its flavour remarkably well. No sugar, of course, and we won’t even mention the artificial sweeteners which, perversely, the vaunt ‘sugar-free’ has become a synonym for in the modern world. The hardness of the chewing ball means that you need to be wary of any delicate dental fillings; it would hook them out in no time. Great for the jawline, though, and those telling facial muscles. When you stop chewing it, it hardens again in a matter of seconds, and the hardened plug is brittle, too.

Mastic was masticated to sweeten the breath (standard issue in the harem), but also for health reasons, too. Anti-plaque, of course, and good for the stomach: recent studies suggest that it can defeat Helicobacter pylori. Mastic from the captain It’s used in cookery. If you like Turkish delight, you will recognise its perfume; it gets made into jam in Turkey, too, and is used to flavour stews and almonds in North Africa.

And then my friend Nico Manessis sent me a bottle of mastic spirit (mastiha, as the Greeks say) called Skinos, this being the original name under which Herodotus recorded it. Very smart bottle, but I was a little nervous of it at first, suspecting it might be fierce. It lurked in the fridge for a month or two, like a monoglot emissary. In the end, I broached it with my brother-in-law the night after returning from Gozo, keen to keep the perfumes of the Mediterranean blowing around my mental chambers for a little longer.

I needn’t have worried: at 30% abv and richly sweetened, it is more liqueur than spirit, succulent and eminently sippable. Once again, it is the complexity and strange emotional power of its aromas which provides the chief lure. We couldn’t keep our hands off it. It’s almost all gone. I’m saving the last drops for some miserably rainy summer’s day here on the North Sea when we badly need Byzantine intoxication. I wish I could buy it in Waitrose, along with more little crystal packets from the Captain.

There’s quite a good website (www.myskinos.com) from which I learn, though, that it has FDA approval and may at least be in the States soon (and with it, a whiff of Byzantium).