Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [57]
Cherries, apricots, peaches and blackcurrants are also used as flavouring for liqueurs, and there are more out-of-the-way ones made with bananas, pineapples, cranberries and the berries of the rowan tree or mountain ash. Blends of different fruits are common. The most widely known of all drinks of this type, Southern Comfort from the USA, is made from a mature grain spirit flavoured with peaches, oranges “and other exotic fruits and herbs”—the recipe is supposed to be over a hundred pages long. Delicious, though to my taste rather fiery, on its own, it’s drunk as part of all manner of mixtures. I’ll mention only two.
Champagne Comfort is not a difficult drink to imagine, or to make, or to drink. My advice is to stop after the first one unless you have the rest of the day free. Then there’s a thing called a Teul, which I’ve never tried and which consists of equal parts of Southern Comfort and tequila heartily stirred with ice—plus, I imagine, a dash of spaceship-propellant on Saturday nights.
Sloe gin, which is ordinary London gin flavoured with sloes and sweetened, is the only all-English liqueur. Traditionally drunk at meets, you know, before going off to hunt the jolly old fox. I can think of nothing better to brighten up a wet Sunday after lunch. Within reason, that is.
Until not so long ago, certainly until well into this century, the spirit drinkers in these islands were in practice quite sharply divided by national and social boundaries. The Irish drank their whiskey, the Scots drank theirs, the lower classes in England drank gin and the upper classes brandy. How the Welsh managed without a national drink I don’t know. The nearest vodka, of course, was a thousand miles away.
That class division in England lingers on to this day. Gin retains an aura of unrespectability from the years of the Victorian gin palace and music hall—it’s a toper’s drink, not for a non-drinker to fiddle with or a connoisseur to go on about. Brandy seems the opposite of all that, with a mystique around it like vintage port and the upper reaches of table wine. You sip it reverently after a serious meal and wouldn’t dream of diluting it with anything.
Times have changed there. To the Victorian Englishman, brandy was a before-dinner or any-time drink with water or mineral water in it. (The Victorian Englishwoman could only get brandy at all either by being no lady or by saying she’d come over faint—still true until quite recently.) You could drink it with the meal and even pour some into your wine if you felt like it. A very relaxed policy.
An awful lot, perhaps nearly all, of the brandy that was treated like that must have been cognac, the best in the world. Sure enough, Cognac is also a place, a small town and considerable area on the left-hand side of France about halfway down. There are various grades according to which part of the area the stuff comes from. The top grade is grande champagne, the next one down fine champagne. You won’t see the others much in the UK, any more than you see bottles labelled “ordinary Scotch whisky.” The champagne part just means open country or steppe, nothing to do with the bubbly or the region on the other side of France where they make it.
French law is terrifically strict on your grande champagne, fine champagne and the rest, but says nothing about the more familiar and apparently important grades stuck on by the manufacturer—Three Star, VSOP (Very Superior Old Pale), XO (Extra Old), etc., which aren’t even standardized among the different firms. Luckily, when ordering you can forget all about grande champagne and VSOP too: the most expensive is likely to be the best and the not quite so expensive not quite so good, as in so many other departments of life. You won’t find a bargain cognac, though a lot of people do say Hine Three Star is the best of that grade.
The other French quality brandy is Armagnac, which again is also a place, farther down on the map. Cognac is supposed to be more delicate, Armagnac earthier and more pungent. But there are other brandies, and