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Slimmers can save both time and weight by using a liquid artificial sweetener and establishing the quantities needed by trial and error. There is a flavour problem here, but remember that the sweetener will generally be sweetening a mixture of flavours much more powerful on the palate than tea or coffee. Up to you.

Note. I have assumed you realize that the above are not the only extras you need to supplement your fundamental gin, vodka, whisky, rum, brandy, etc. You will also, of course, have to have French and Italian vermouths, Campari, Angostura bitters, tonic water and all that lot. But I take these to form part of your daily stock.

Freedom and Whisky gang thegither!

—ROBERT BURNS

Wine snob—a man or woman who drinks the label and the price.

—OLOF WIJK

Porter. . . . drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things. Macduff. What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter. Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery; it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

They who drink beer will think beer.

—WASHINGTON IRVING

FIRST THOUGHTS ON WINE

Deep colour and big shaggy nose. Rather a jumbly, untidy sort of wine, with fruitiness shooting off one way, firmness another and body pushing about underneath. It will be as comfortable and as comforting as the 1961 Nuits-St-Georges once it has pulled its ends in and settled down.

That genuine extract from a wine journal is the sort of thing that gets the stuff a bad name with a lot of people who would enjoy wine if they could face trying it seriously. Let it be said at once that talking about big shaggy noses and so forth receives a deeper and more educated contempt from real wine-drinkers than from the average man in the pub. But, before I get to a more positive approach, let me describe, in careful stages, not what you should do when serving wine to your guests, but what you nearly always do (if you are anything like me):

1. Realize that They will be arriving in less than an hour and you have done damn-all about it.

2. Realize, on your way to the cellar or wherever you keep the stuff, that the red wine to go with the roast beef will be nowhere near the required room temperature if left to warm up unassisted.

3. Realize, on reaching the stuff, that it has not had time to “settle” after being delivered, and that you should have realized six weeks—or, if you had wanted to give Them a treat, ten years—ago exactly what wine you were going to need tonight.

4. Decide that They can bloody well take what They are given, grab some bottles and take them to the kitchen.

5. Take the foil off the necks of the bottles. (Now that the bottlers have mostly decided they can cut costs by leaving the lead out of this, your present task is like removing nailpolish with a fish-knife.)

6. Look for the corkscrew.

7. Having (we will assume) found the corkscrew, unscrew the cork that somebody has left screwed on it and open the bottles.

8. Find something to take the gunk or crap off the bottlenecks and take it off.

9. Decide that, while any fool can tell when wine is cold, and nearly any fool knows nowadays that a red wine is not supposed to be cold, hardly anyone knows a decent glass of it from a bad one, and stick the bottles in a saucepan of warm water.

10. Spend parts of the next hour-and-a-half wondering whether old Shagbag, who is reputed to know one wine from another, will denounce you for boiling out whatever quality tonight’s stuff might have had, or will suffer in silence. Also wonder whether the others will think 1971 a rather insultingly recent year for a Médoc, whether to get up another bottle on the off-chance that They