Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [79]
This is the last of the present series of drinking columns. They’ve been great fun to do. Hearty thanks and good wishes to all who kindly took the trouble to write in with questions or information. Cheers!
How’s Your Glass?
INTRODUCTION
ALTHOUGH DRINK IS a contentious subject—I have seen grown men close to blows over whether you should or should not bruise the mint in a Mint Julep—there are a lot of facts connected with it, some well known, some less so, and some on the fringes which may have their own appeal. (What would you probably have been offered to drink at the court of Attila the Hun? Mascara—where might you find yourself drinking some? How is Freddie Fudpucker remembered?) And although tastes differ here at least as widely as in any other field, there is consensus too—you and I may well not see eye to eye over which Tuscan red is our favourite, but we would have to agree with everybody else that the finest brandy in the world is Cognac.
All in all there is a great deal of ground to cover, even if the enterprise makes no claim to be comprehensive and limits itself to giving samples of A and interesting bits of B. To reel such things off one after another on the “Did You Know?” principle would be boring for the writer and indigestible for the reader. An obvious answer was a series of quizzes. I love trying to answer such things myself if the subject is right, in the hope of scoring points of course, and impressing the other fellows with my genius, but at least as much to acquire information offered in a teasing way. I may turn out not to know the year of Schumann’s birth—it was 1810, I find—but I would be quite tickled to learn it from the answer to somebody’s question 17 (b). So I have been prodigal of information, some of it not specially useful information, quite a lot of it historical, vaguely literary, and concerned with the origins of words. This last, I think, appeals to a fair number of those who speak our extraordinary language.
Besides information there is inevitably opinion, sometimes others’, more often mine. Drink, as I have said, is not a field where all agree, and an objective essay on it, even in such a form as this book, would be a poor thing. At the same time I have tried not to let those opinions of mine affect the nub of question or answer. I praise or query or am rude parenthetically, from the sidelines.
Whether or not readers will feel the same, compiling this questionnaire suited me down to the ground. It put together in a unique and pleasurable way my abiding partiality for the subject, the attraction of a kind of writing new to me and an outlet for my starved didactic instinct, and was great fun to assemble.
There are a few trick questions and other dodges in what follows, but it would spoil things to be more specific.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
COD—Concise Oxford Dictionary
OED—Oxford English Dictionary
Q—quiz
q—question
a—answer
QUIZZES
WINE—ELEMENTARY
Short of demanding to know why red wine is called by that name or what champagne is, I have made this quiz as easy as possible. But I advise you to deign to answer it and pile up marks for what may be thin times ahead. So straight to business without lingering over explanations that wine is often kept in bottles, drunk out of glasses, etc.
1. Wines vary in many ways, of which perhaps the most important is the amount of alcohol they contain. What percentage of alcohol would you expect to find in:
(a) a light wine
(b) a strong wine?
2. When a wine is said to lack body an adverse criticism is obviously being made, and everyone knows what is meant without necessarily being able to explain just what “body” is. Can you?
3. Some wines can be told apart by the bottles they come in. Describe briefly the characteristic shape of
(a) the Burgundy bottle
(b) the claret bottle (by the way, what exactly is claret?)
(c) the Chianti bottle?
4. A fluid ounce (UK) is one-twentieth of an Imperial