A sweet shop for grown-ups

Most shopping, once you're into adulthood, loses its allure. Goods begin to fall into three categories: the mundane (All-Bran and toilet paper), the out-of-stock (anything you really need) and the overexpensive (anything you really want). There are, in other words, no more sweet shops.

Shopping bliss, for most of us, is conditioned for a lifetime when, aged eight and jangling a pocket full of change, you march up to a counter covered in lurid chews, serpentine liquorice, powdery sherbet, lumpy toffee and wasp-bodied gobstoppers. You look, you buy, you thrill. And you feel sick later.

Perhaps the success of the curious new mid-terrace shop at the bottom end of Westbourne Grove has something to do with this search for lost gratification. This is, if you like, an adult sweet shop. The shelves groan, not with jelly babies or foam shrimps, but with jars full of liquid-filled demijohns, spigot-beaked wooden casks, and the kind of intriguing bottles that look as if they belong on a pantomime set. It's called Vom Fass ("from the cask" in German), and you can buy a wide range of curious drinks there. Loose.

It's run as a franchise by a Frenchman called Richard Mosconi. He went into a German master-branch one day and thought it was a wonderful idea - for very French reasons. You can taste lots of different things, and you can talk copiously. This is not a shop for muttering introverts who want to be in and out in 30 seconds.

"Are you brave enough to try something?" Richard said to me, having already established over the previous 20 minutes that I was crazy enough to try anything. He gave me a cocktail of the "black gold of Styria" (pumpkin-seed oil), mixed with a repellent cream liqueur called Vanilla Dream. This slithery calorie transfusion was his perfect hangover cure - proving yet again that the best idea is not to develop a hangover in the first place.

The range is wide. There are wines, white fruit spirits, whiskies, Cognacs, Armagnacs, liqueurs, sherry, Madeira - and lots of oils and vinegars, too. The company claims to have 400 suppliers. I liked the fact that you can buy in small amounts (just 100ml is the basic pricing unit); the prettiness of the bottles, with their handwritten descriptions, makes them attractive presents. And quality?

Mixed, in a word. The very finest qualities of anything will never be offered in this way. If you create a great drink, you want it to arrive on the customer's table in great condition, which means bottling it yourself, often cosseting the drink inside the bottle under blankets of carbon dioxide or nitrogen.

Inevitably, many of the slower-moving spirit lines in Vom Fass oxidise as they sit in the jars or barrels, which are not kept topped up at all times. I bought 100ml of XO Cognac for £5, apparently a good price - until you taste the spirit, and realise that XO here stands for Extraordinarily Ordinary. (It tasted robust and unsubtle, like a budget VSOP.) I was impressed that Vom Fass was stocking the new Isle of Arran single malt (£3), though less impressed with the spirit itself.

It was jolly enough with lots of cask sweetness, though without the finesse of a truly great dram. The (kegged) wines are not competitive with what you can buy, ready bottled, in supermarkets. The most expensive was an Argentinian Cabernet. At £7.99 a litre, it was thin and disappointing. The halflitreof Primitivo del Tarantino, at £3.99, was a bit better, with its tangy plum fruit, though it was simple stuff.

My most successful purchases were a couple of terrific olive oils, including a thick and sappy single-estate Italian oil called Santini and a creamy extra virgin oil from Crete (£2.90 and £1.80, respectively). Buying nut oils like walnut or hazelnut in just 100ml quantities is a good idea too, since they also degrade if not used swiftly.