Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [94]
10. Although a small amount of alcohol daily is beneficial to health, there will always be some support for teetotalism—a terrible word, many will think. What is its origin?
ANSWERS
WINE—ELEMENTARY
1. (a) 8–10 per cent (b) 13–15 per cent.
2. The proportion of grape-products as opposed to water-content. A wine of good body is a thick wine in this sense.
3. (a) Cylindrical, with sloping shoulders.
(b) Cylindrical, with squarer shoulders. Claret, traditional UK term for red wine from Bordeaux region. Now used also for other wines of the same general type.
(c) Traditionally, long neck, rounded body, straw jacket and base. An extra mark for noting that a lot, an increasing amount, of Chianti turns up nowadays in a bottle similar to (b).
4. (a) 26 . Not an obvious quantity but it seems about right.
(b) Three-quarters of a litre or 75 cl. The French and others must have thought it was about right too.
(c) (A bottle containing) a fifth of a US gallon, smaller than the Imperial at 128 fl. oz. compared with 160. When a tiny difference in the size of the US fl. oz. is taken into account, the fifth emerges at 46.5432 cu. in. as against the standard wine-bottle’s 46.2458. So the Americans must also have thought it was about right.
5. That it has acquired an unpleasant smell and taste from a mould in the cork. Very rare today.
6. Wine-grapes. There are at least 1,000 different varieties. Many wines, from Alsace, California, Australia, etc., are known by the type of grape used. They are called varietal wines.
7. (a) Sweet white from Bordeaux. In Sauternes district.
(b) Dry white from Loire valley. Central France.
(c) Dry red, (district of) Burgundy. East-central France.
8. (a) Sweet white sparkling Muscatel from Piemonte in the north west.
(b) Dry red from Veneto, north-central, near Verona.
(c) White, usually dry, some semi-sweet and sweet, Latium, near Rome.
9. (a) (Chiefly) dry red, from Rioja region in north Spain.
(b) Dry white flavoured with pine resin, from Greece (Attica).
(c) “Green wine,” i.e. young, immature wine, red and white but usually white in UK, dry, with a slight sparkle, from north Portugal.
10. The cork of an upright bottle will eventually dry out and admit air, rapid fluctuations of temperature will injure the contents and daylight will, in the case of a red wine, turn it brown. But not drinking it is worse than any of that. One such offender, father of a daring and ingenious son, is supposed to have decided eventually to drink his 1959 Château Haut-Brion after all and found his mouth full of red ink.
WINE — INTERMEDIATE
1. Homer. His use of the phrase suggests that wine had become a familiar part of eastern Mediterranean life by 700 bc at latest.
2. About ad 700, in the Old English epic poem “Beowulf.”
3. The cork. Wine could now be kept and matured in the bottle instead of sitting (and frequently going off) in the barrel.
4. “Phylloxera vastatrix”—“dry-leaf devastator.” Retrieved by grafting European vines on to relatively immune rootstocks from the eastern US. But e.g. in 1981 one-third of German vineyards were still affected.
5. The type of grape used or principally used, given increasing emphasis in recent years. Crosses are becoming common.
6. Both, naturally; e.g. Tavel rosé by the first method, some pink champagne and some cheap still wines by the second. Then, of course, there is the “vin rosé” your host has created half an hour before your arrival by mixing the un-drunk red and white from yesterday.
7. Years ago he just hung about and let the natural ambient yeasts do it, but nowadays he usually kills them off and puts in his own pure strain, perhaps with a little added heat for encouragement.
8. He can chill the must or add brandy or sulphur dioxide to deaden the yeast, or strain the must to get the yeast out.
9. True! Which does not mean to say that red will not go with chicken or pork, or that individual preferences are somehow bad.
10. “Wine can also be made from grapes.” You may specify a French, Spanish, etc., wine-grower according to where your last