Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [80]
They drank how much at a sitting?
IN HIS WONDERFUL book on eighteenth-century London, City of Laughter, the historian Vic Gatrell quotes La Rochefoucauld’s experiences of the Duke of Grafton’s hospitality at Euston Hall in London. “The drinking is sometimes quite alarming,” the French aphorist wrote:
The bottles go continually round the table, and the master of the house makes sure that no one misses a turn … the conversation could hardly be freer; everyone gives his political opinions with the same ease as his opinions on personal matters. Sometimes the conversation becomes equally free on indecent matters, for one is allowed to speak of everything … I have heard things said here in good company that would be the worst breach of decent manners in France.
He goes on to quote another Frenchman, Faujas de Saint-Fond, who is shocked by the inevitable chamber pot, used “with so little ceremony that the person who has occasion to use it does not even interrupt his talk during the operation.”
We may be shocked, too, but we can hardly be surprised when we realize that a man might drink three bottles of wine at dinner and think nothing of it. Pitt the Younger—described bawdily as “stiff to everybody but a lady”—would drink a bottle of port at home before going into the House of Commons, then share a couple more with his friend Dundas afterward. The Duke of York drank so much that “six bottles of claret after dinner scarcely made a perceptible change in his countenance.” Byron, Gatrell tells us, would drink from six in the evening until five the next morning, and on it went.
How things have changed. Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without the modern citizen being scolded and admonished and warned about the evils of drink. It would not seem so bad if there were any reason or consistency to it, but one moment doctors tell us that any wine at all will surely do for us, the next that a glass, or two units (did anyone ever say to another, “Do you fancy popping out for a few units?” we wonder), or whatever is the currently fashionable amount will protect us from heart disease. Actually, no, it won’t. No—as you were. It will. But only if it’s red. Nope, sorry, doesn’t matter if it’s red or not, it’ll kill you …
It would seem even more patronizing had the cat not been let out of the bag that the U.K. government’s “recommended weekly unit consumption” was imaginary. By “imaginary” we mean that it had been made up. There was no scientific basis for it at all. They had plucked the figures from thin air.
Recently we were told that it was the unemployed and under -educated who were most at risk from alcohol. Even more recently, we were told, no, it was the middle classes who were really at risk. Most recently of all (at the time of writing; who knows what will happen hereafter), the Royal College of Physicians claimed that pubs are “pushing customers towards unsafe levels of drinking” by selling wine in big glasses, and an MP who is of course not being opportunist to increase his profile (which is why we are not going to name him) demanded a new law to make them stop it and sell us little glasses instead.
We have only two comments to make. Well, actually, we have three comments to make, but we will only be allowed to make two of them. The first is that the people who roam around inner cities at night, roaring, vomiting, and fighting, are not usually those who have been drinking a rather nice pinot noir in whatever size of glass. And the second is that someone who cannot tell