Fifty years ago my great-grandfather Carlo Portolan hauled down from the roof of his Lincoln Heights home a glass jug full of fragrant black booze, warm from 40 days in the sun. He decanted it into smaller bottles, affixed to each a masking tape label inscribed with the year — 1974 — and passed them around to friends and family. He died four years later. His bottles of nocino, an Italian liqueur that looks like tar and tastes like Christmas, carried on.

My mother has one. So do each of her siblings. The glass bottles still get pulled out sometimes at the end of holidays and long family gatherings. All flavors, save for the sear of grain alcohol, have long since faded. It’s drinkable, but serves mostly as an excuse to speak fondly of the people who made it, the places they came from and the threads that still tie us together.