If alcohol is off the menu...

Christmas brings families together, for better or worse, and that means two things. Many important guests will be too young for alcohol, and someone has to drive home afterwards.

The truth is that the soft-drink universe, once one of uniformly lurid artificiality, has changed far more dramatically than the wine universe in the past year or two. Plain orange squash now walks with the dinosaurs; fresh and exotic ingredients have evolved their way into our lives.

I tried a huge range of non-alcoholic drinks for this piece. Visually, the smartest is AmÈ Celebration (Safeway, £2.15), in its conical black bottle and raffia bow-tie; it's got lots of exciting things in there (including jasmine and gentian) but the problem is that it is in essence still only a flavoured water, and as such it just doesn't have much flavour.

Most wine-like to look at in the glass is Welch's American Concord Grape Juice (Tesco £1.99): sweet stuff, but with intriguing smells of hop garden and cherry pie and with refreshing acidity, too.

If you want a fizzy version, Schloer Red Grape (Tesco £1.25) is pretty and quaffable. Cranberry should be turkey-friendly; there are a lot of boring cranberry "juice drinks" out there, but Sainsbury's Cranberry and Passion Fruit with Green Tea (72p for a little 240ml bottle) rises fragrantly above the parapet. (Don't worry: you can't taste the tea.)

Before we leave the colour red behind us, Tesco's Finest Scottish Raspberry Drink (a brightly flavoured and not overly sweet fizzy water) makes good, clean drinking at 65p for a litre, while the much thicker Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice Drink with Strawberry PurÈe from Sainsbury's at £2.49 per litre is like a liquidised summer fruit salad.

Weirdest of the lot is the nauseous Pineapple and Coconut Flavoured Juice Drink (Tesco, 99p per litre); the ingredients reveal that it doesn't actually contain any coconut at all.

And the best? My non-alcoholic Christmas triumvirate would be the Duchy Originals Organic Lemon Refresher (Safeway £1.59, Tesco £1.79 for 750 ml), bright and zesty with a soft fizz, and two great soft drinks from the Fentiman's range.

The Ginger Brew (Tesco 95p, Waitrose 99p for 275ml) really lets you have it thanks to extra capsicum sneaked into the ingredients, while new to me is the Seville Orange Jigger (Sainsbury 95p for 275ml). The smell brought back memories of my mum simmering marmalade in January, while the taste is as bracing as a Boxing Day walk on the beach.