Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [40]
My close personal involvement with drinks and drinking goes back all of forty years. In that time my experience has been varied and farflung. I have drunk cognac in Cognac, port in Oporto, raki in Turkey, tequila in Mexico City, moonshine in Kentucky, not to mention poteen in Fleet Street, bitter and industrial alcohol in Oxford, Yugoslav whisky in Yugoslavia, Japanese whisky in Glasgow and sweet Spanish wine and lemonade in Swansea. Also gin in England.
Drinks writers have got to put on a show of covering the whole subject, but I would never believe a man who claimed to be equally interested or qualified in all the kinds of booze. I am basically a beer-and-spirits man myself, at least I started off with beer. You virtually had to in those far-off days. I drink a good deal less of it now, partly because I can afford not to, partly because in this country beer is intimately associated with pubs and pub life, and something horrible has happened to pub life.
With spirits I feel I am on home ground. They are really my tipple. I have to face it. At the same time I have found out quite a lot about them. Quite recently they have started to become important in a new way with this cocktail revival, hard to believe in but apparently real enough.
Cocktails have always appealed to me because they involve mixtures, experiments, paraphernalia, testing, tasting, finally serving. For the same reason I enjoy cups and coolers, and punches both cold and hot with wines and spirits and all combinations.
Now we reach the point at which my credentials become slightly less than impeccable. With all those drinks I have got through, what I have not done is drink first-rate table wines at their place of origin, work my way through classic vintages and develop an educated palate. To do that, what you really need, shorn of the talk, is a rich father, and I missed it. No complaints, but my lack of erudition in this department is going to limit my remarks on wine to the short, the sharp and the practical, to what my own God-given taste will reach to.
While I was passing up the chance of finding out about the great Burgundies, I was at any rate learning something about the vital part played in the world of drink by finance. At its crudest, this involved a straight calculation of alcoholic potency against price, and there was a time I remember well when after some research it was established that three barley wines, a pint of rough cider and a small whisky gave you the best return on—can it have been five bob? Unhappily, there are no bargains above that sort of level—you tend to get what you pay for. Treat all alcoholic snips with the greatest reserve.
Apart from the occasional hint designed to protect you against being bullied by a wine waiter or poisoned by your host at a private party, my advice will be meant to help you to serve good drinks in your own home.
Gin was invented by the Dutch, but the English took it up about four hundred years ago and spread it round the world. It consists of an extremely pure spirit, flavoured with juniper berries and other ingredients, or “botanicals,” such as coriander seed and cinnamon bark. There are no fine gins as there are fine brandies and fine whiskies, but there are some very good and popular ones. Always buy one or other of these, a nationally known brand, and avoid supermarket and off-licence gins.
Most gin in this country is drunk with tonic and ice and lemon. And, if you want to take trouble, a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. After many years of exposure, I find this a rather unworthy, mawkish drink, best left to women, youngsters and whisky distillers. Its history is suspect: in the days of the Empire, you were supposed to drink quinine water, the ancestor of tonic, to keep away fever.