Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [92]
One or two clues are given, but no really helpful ones.
1. Johan Siegert, a German army surgeon who served in the Napoleonic wars and later with Simón Bolívar the Liberator in South America.
2. Aeneas Coffey, an Irishman, once an excise official, in 1831.
3. Robert Stein.
4. The late Felix Kir.
5. Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, in Switzerland, about 1790.
Now five questions from the other side of the fence. Say who invented or otherwise had to do with the following:
6. Chaptalization, the practice of adding sugar to grape-must to boost the alcoholic strength of a wine. Very popular with wine-makers in thin years.
7. The cuve close (sealed vat) method of making sparkling wine. The manufacturer induces his refermentation in a large vat instead of individual bottles. Widely used outside the Champagne region.
8. The traditional British system of calculating the strength or proof of alcoholic drinks, whereby standard spirits are 70 degrees proof or 70°.
9. Champagne. Not as easy as it may look.
10. The Dry Martini Cocktail. There is no certainty here, but it was probably one of the following:
Jerry Thomas Martini Rossi Martini di Arma di Taggia Martini-Henry John Doxat
POUSSE - CAFÉ I
My French dictionary says a pousse-café is a liqueur, my English one says much the same, helpfully adding “[F, = push-coffee],” but the UK Bartenders Guild explains that it consists of liqueurs of different densities poured into a glass one after the other in such a way that they remain separate bands of fluid, and gives a recipe involving Grenadine, Crème de Menthe, Galliano, Kümmel and brandy. I use it as the heading of this quiz to indicate fancifully that the questions here involve different sorts of drink, this one wine, that one spirits, a third something else again. Here and there I hope the question will not directly reveal the category concerned.
1. What, apart from its availability, is the characteristic of the human foot that fits it so well for the making of wine?
2. What is twice a chota peg?
3. If you were to ask for “a beer” in English at a French café, especially in Paris, what might you very well be given?
4. No substantial authority has ever found drinkable any of the so-called “cotton gins” of Mississippi and Texas. True or false?
5. In what circumstances might you find yourself drinking Mascara?
6. There is a fearful drink called a Snowball which combines Advocaat, lime-juice and fizzy lemonade or even 7-Up. But Advocaat itself is not bad as a between-meals drink. What is it?
7. Distinguish between Ay and Ahr.
8. The neck label on a bottle of Hungarian Tokay wine may carry the legend “Aszu 2 puttonyos” or some other number. What is the significance of this?
9. Every serious drinker in this country owes a small debt of gratitude to the French physicist Joseph Gay-Lussac (1778–1850). Why?
10. “People may say what they like about the decline of Christianity; the religious system that produced Green Chartreuse can never die.” Who wrote that?
POUSSE - CAFÉ II
Here is another miscellany quiz. Whatever answerers may feel about them, setters like the freedom of manoeuvre such arrangements give them. The answer to a wine-quiz question, say, is already partly indicated by its presence there. But here, some legitimate mystification is possible.
1. Name the odd man out:
Beaujolais Villages Beaujolais Primeur Beaujolais Gamay Beaujolais Beaujolais Nouveau 2. What is the largest alcoholic product of Jerez de la Frontera in Spain?
3. It is safe to say that wherever spirits are made, a proportion will be illicitly made. Some of the slang terms for these are widely known. Give three:
(a) orginating in UK
(b) in US
(c) in Ireland.
(You may well think that (a) too has US origin.) For bonus marks, guess dates of first recorded use; twenty-five years’ leeway allowed.
4. Soda-water was first made as a substitute for naturally gassy spa waters thought to be beneficial to health. But something called Spa water, in bottle, is to