Leave the Drinking to Real Drinkers, eh Pumpkin?

26/10/06 11:32
Clip Art jackolantern1
I’m not altogether clear on when our culture went completely in the tank, but it hit me square in the mouth last week. I think of it as the great pumpkin scare of two thousand and six. I was judging a cocktail contest, whose provenance I shall leave unnamed to protect the innocent, and one of the drinks offered to those of us sitting in judgment behind the (literal in this case) curtain, was essentially a pumpkin pie in a stemmed glass. Took a few seconds to taste it because the rim of the glass was coated for a good half-inch with cinnamon. Now cinnamon is a lovely spice, just the thing for lightly dusting on toast with a little sugar, but when applied in copious quantities to glassware, and directly under the nose, it causes one’s eyes to close involuntarily.

The drink itself may have involved a distilled spirit, but with a nose in cinnamon-induced spasm and a tongue heavily coated in what tasted like concentrated canned pumpkin pie filling, it was impossible to tell. The drink’s creator was, I’m sure, proud of the thing. Even one judge—a man whose fond memories of his grandmother’s pumpkin pie outweighed his ordinarily sound judgment—liked it. Not so much as a cocktail, he said, but as a dessert. The consensus, however, was that it was far, far too much of a mediocre thing, less a cocktail than a homage to an autumnal theme, a desperate attempt, like a Martha Stewart centerpiece, to get an entire season inside one container. Plus it tasted like a vanilla malt gone horribly wrong. Read More...
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Eye Openers

12/10/06 08:13
“First today,” the old man liked to say, and it was usually on the way home from work. He wasn’t averse, however, to having a quick one on the way in in the morning, particularly if it was below zero and his calendar included, as it often did, changing brake shoes on trains. Outside. His eye opener was a shot of Jim Beam, water back. The water was in lieu of an Old Style, because mornings call for a little restraint.

Eye openers. A sacred, if dying, tradition--at least in America. French cement finishers still greet the dawn with a thimbleful of marc—a clear grape spirit made from the stems and seeds left over in the wine factories and aged for as long as it takes to get a funnel in the bottle. The Italian version is grappa, and one of the great wonders of the booze business is how they managed to convince American stockbrokers that it was worth $25 a shot. Had something to do with those fancy bottles is the conventional wisdom. Portuguese grape pickers are allotted a similar morning tot with a name that translates as “bug killer.” Seems to do the job.

Every culture makes something like this--the Irish call theirs poteen, and here in the land of the free we actually have a legal name: Corn whiskey. The distillers call it white dog, and it’s what drips from the copper coil. The blessed distilleries of Scotland used to have a tradition of called the “dram queue,” when everyone in town lined up in the morning (and several times during the day) for a taste of the local product fresh from the still. Read More...
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The Idiots' Guide to Sightseeing in Southwest England and Wales

04/10/06 15:35
Sullivan2
Sheep, very short men with pug noses and great bellies, beer, sheep, extremely narrow roads, sheep, beer, ruined castles, sheep, beer, sheep, wild ponies, sheep, moors, beer, sheep, pubs with very low ceilings, sheep, hedges, beer, dry stone walls, sheep, golf courses, sheep, lamb chops, sheep, monasteries, beer, and sheep.

Some of the sheep will be dead, of course. I mentioned to Trevor, my driver through the Dartmoor, where the wild ponies roam, that there seemed to be an awful lot of sheep just standing in the middle of the road, looking curiously at the passing cars. “Do they always stand in the road like that,” I asked. “Oh, no. At night, when the tarmac holds the heat better than the moor, they lay down in the road to sleep.” There’s some who hold the theory that the origin of “pub crawl” dates to the early days of the automobile in these parts, when the return from the pub meant a long, slow crawl around the sleeping sheep in the road. The wild ponies on the same moor are generally smarter, just, than the sheep. They wait alongside the road for the traveling Americans to come up to them and pet them. “Then, likely as not, they bite their fingers off,” Trevor said. Which made me feel better about the autumn round-up, when that year’s crop of ponies are gathered and sold—some to become pets/cart pullers to the children of country gentlefolk and the rest, according to Trevor, “bought and sent to France.” “To pull carts through picturesque Normandy villages?” I asked. “Well, no,” he said. Oh. Poor ponies. On the other hand, if they’re going to bite off vacationers’ fingers ... Read More...
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Very Wet in Every Sense

28/09/06 22:53
A blog. This is a relatively new English word with two meanings. If you’re not a journalist, it means: “Hey, I’m a writer! I’ve got a column!” If you already scribble for a living, it means: “Here’s something I couldn’t sell.”

So when Dan Dunn, the eponymous Imbiber hisownself calls me and wants to know if I’ll blog for his new website, I promise him solemnly to send some copy. And here it is—a few hundred words I wouldn’t even try to sell. Read More...
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