I have a drinking problem. My problem is the things I am unable to drink: I cannot stand the taste of negronis. Yes, I know. First world problems and all that. Then again the first world is where I live, and right now, here in first world cocktail land, negronis really are the thing.

If the peach-red blushing negroni were a car it would be a gleaming vintage Mercedes convertible. That's too bloody small for me to fit into. Instead, it's a very bitter drink, probably invented in Florence around 1920 for a Count Negroni, made with sweet vermouth, gin and the foul, violent insult that is Campari. I'm meant to like it because grown-ups do. I don't. I don't like its bitterness in the same way I don't like having my corns sliced off. Drinking a negroni feels like punishment for a crime not yet committed.

Normally I admit to such matters of taste breezily. So shoot me, I say. I can tell you, for example, that I hate Heinz baked beans – too sweet, texture of coagulated fish slime – and be confident in my prejudice. But I fear this dislike of negronis, indeed of the entire bitters family, is actually a character defect. In the past I have accused others of having failed to attain full adulthood for not liking oysters or for ordering their steak well done; well my negroni thing feels equally like a refusal to slough off the itchy starter skin of childhood.

Here's the point: as a kid you are meant to acquire a taste for booze through hard work and bloody mindedness. I remember well my first teenage slug of beer and then staring at the glass, as if it had been an indecent proposal from someone you called uncle but wasn't.

That rough bitter hit – nothing compared to Campari, but shocking all the same – the burn of the alcohol, the whole complicated, gaseous business of getting it down you. But you push on because you know liking this stuff is the oily hinge between the infantile and the mature, and that somewhere in the glass probably lies a secret which has something to do with sex, as most secrets do.

As a kid my mother introduced me to the possibilities of drinking through a small glass of custard-thick advocaat with a depth charge of cherry brandy. She called it blood and pus, and thought this hilarious. It had infantile elements: the vanilla hit of the advocaat, the sweet shop fruit of the cherry brandy. But there was also the burn which was not pleasant. Still, I recognised it as something I would have to get to know.

In the 90s, when alcopops first rose to prominence, I wrote articles complaining that they made booze far too palatable. Young people of today: too lazy to endure stoically the suffering that becoming a drinker demands.

And yet the resurgence of the negroni has made me reconsider my own drinking career. It turns out I really am little better than those kids. I swear off the aromatics of gin in favour of the cold, formless punch of vodka, better still with a glug of lime cordial. Yes, I know: it's my own made-to-measure alcopop.

At 46 I had thought myself all grown up. But in the matter of the glass and the negroni that isn't in it, apparently I am not. I'm still a child. Oh, the shame.