Vienna, 26 January 2024
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. But for reasons that I cannot explain, I have procrastinated. Nevertheless, I have finally got myself to put pen to paper and get to work.
The germ for the post was planted several years ago during a hike my wife and I were taking along the edges of Lake Como. We dropped into a café to have ourselves a cappuccino. There, on a shelf, the café owner had lovingly placed a long row of bottles of gin, all of them some strange colour: pastel yellow, blue, or even – I think – pink. I say “I think”, because the memory of it all is somewhat fuzzy now. At the time, I took a photo of that row of bottles to show to my readers – as I say, I thought immediately of writing a post about gin – but somewhere along the line I decided to delete it, convincing myself I would never get around to writing the post. This photo, which I created with a bit of photoshopping, will have to stand in for that initial vision of mine.
All those coloured gins startled me. I have since read on the internet that this is the latest fad in gin making – or perhaps, to put it a little more cynically, the latest way for gin makers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As one internet entry puts it, “coloured gins are having a moment, the latest phase in the great craft gin revival. You can now choose from a whole spectrum, including pink grapefruit gin, Amalfi lemon gin the colour of a pale sunrise, bitter orange gin like alcoholic marmalade and lavender gins that change colour on contact with tonic. But the most popular is violet.”
I dislike to think of myself as a traditionalist, I’ve always been suspicious of tradition, but hello! coloured gin! what is the world coming to?! I am firmly of the opinion that gin should be a colourless liquid to which you add things to enhance its basic taste and possibly – just possibly – add colour.
Talking of gin’s basic taste, I think we all know that this primarily comes from the addition of juniper berries, from juniper trees like this beautiful example.
Juniper is after all in the drink’s name. The ancestor of British gin is Flemish/Dutch jenever. Jenever making was brought to England by traders or by English soldiers returning from fighting in the Low Countries. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened jenever to gin. But my surfing has shown me that today’s gin makers add other “botanicals” to their gin, to distinguish it from everyone else’s. Citrus “notes” seem to be important, imparted by the addition of the peels of lemon, or bitter orange, or lime, or grapefruit. Then small amounts of all manner of spices can be added: anise, fennel, caraway, coriander, licorice, orris, longan, baobab, savory, angelica, cardamom, grains of paradise, cubeb, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, almond, saffron … the mind whirls in front of this veritable cornucopia of spices.
And it doesn’t finish there. Even pine needles and cones can be added, or frankincense! Of course, which extra “botanicals” are added are closely guarded secrets.
I wouldn’t want readers to think I am a frequent drinker of gin – unlike the late Queen Elizabeth, who was, I was somewhat astonished to learn, still knocking back two gin-based drinks daily in her nineties: a gin and Dubonnet with lots of ice before lunch, and a dry martini after it.
I will just have a gin and tonic from time to time, when the fancy takes me – and when the ingredients are available. Harking back to my earlier harrumphing, readers will see that a G&T is satisfactorily colourless.
I am glad to see that I am in good company in my fondness for G&T. Philip Larkin, a poet whom I greatly admire, was an aficionado. We have him here nursing a G&T.
He once wrote to his lover: “life is very narrow without glasses OF GIN AND TONIC”. Note the capital letters and the plural “glasses” – he imbibed considerably more gin and tonic than I do. He even devoted several lines of one of his poems, Sympathy in White Major, to the making of a gin and tonic:
When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.
But in my mind the G&T is also firmly anchored to the colonial period of India, where it was particularly popular among the British colonialists. I’ve read that their excuse for quaffing large amounts of G&T was to ingest quinine as a prophylactic against malaria – tonic water contains quinine. Malaria was certainly a problem in India – my father contracted it while a colonialist in India – but I’ve also read that actually this can only have been an excuse, because there isn’t enough quinine in tonic water to work as a prophylactic. In any event, I throw in a photo of two British colonialists languidly seated and being fanned by an Indian servant. On the table, one can make out what seems to be a glass of G&T.
Although I am now firmly in the G&T camp, my gin drinking habit didn’t start there. I began knocking back gin when I was 17, maybe even 16 – yes, it was easier to get served in pubs when I was young – and my gin drink of choice was what I remember being called a gin and lime, although the proper name for this drink seems to be a gimlet. Again, I am pleased to know that I was in good company. Gimlets play a not insignificant role in Raymond Chandler’s book “The Long Goodbye”.
Early on in the story, the hero, or maybe we should call him the anti-hero, the “hard-boiled” detective Philip Marlowe, meets a friend, who happens to be British, in a bar:
We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
Rose’s Lime Juice cordial … an icon of my youth:
My British grandmother often had a bottle, but not for making gimlets; I don’t remember her ever drinking anything stronger than a dry sherry. She would make lime drinks for us grandchildren, adding water to a generous portion of Rose’s Lime Juice. Yes, I have very fond memories of that cordial. My reading tells me, though, that today’s mixologists (strange word …) pooh-pooh on Rose’s Lime Juice in its modern form, considering it far sweeter than the Lime Cordial made by the original Mr. Rose. As a result, there is a cottage industry in the production of lime cordials considered to be closer to the Real Thing, and the gimlets made with these revisited cordials are claimed to taste much better. If ever I end up in some bar offering one of these alternative lime cordials, I might try a gimlet. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my G&T, thank you.
Chandler’s tales of Marlowe are great, by the way. If any of my readers have never dipped into them, I highly recommend they pick up a copy. And of course, a good number of his books have been turned into films over the decades. Liam Neeson is the latest well-known actor to play Marlowe, but there have been a number of others before him: Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, Robert Montgomery. But to my mind by far the best Marlowe was Humphrey Bogart, who back in 1946 played him in “The Big Sleep”.
It was also Bogart who, in “Casablanca”, after Ingrid Bergman has entered his nightclub, talked to him, and left, utters the anguished phrase: “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Which brings us back to gin.
Marlowe’s friend in “The Long Goodbye” says gimlets beat martinis hollow. I wouldn’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini. But I’m sure James Bond – who must be the best known martini drinker in the world – would have disagreed. Here, turning to films again, we have Sean Connery, the greatest of all the James Bonds (at least that’s what I think), preparing himself a martini.
Mind you, I don’t think Bond’s martini is quite the Real Thing, which I read should be a mix of gin and dry vermouth – the precise ratio is of course a source of heated debate in certain mixological circles but the current consensus seems to be around 5 parts gin to one part vermouth. The two should be poured onto ice cubes, stirred not shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail glass, and served with a green olive or twist of lemon peel as garnish.
In his book “Casino Royale”, however, Ian Fleming has Bond ordering another kind of dry martini at the bar in the casino:
‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’
Sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein martini, if you ask me. And Bond’s well known comment “shaken, not stirred” has mixologists shaking their head in disapproval; it should be the other way around. I’m sure that other famous martini drinker, the late Queen, would have pursed her lips in disapproval, even though, as we know since the 2012 London Olympics, she and Bond were BFFs.
This mention of the House of Windsor lets me segue smoothly to another gin-based drink which I have also never tried, a fruit-based punch using Pimm’s No. 1 Cup as the base. To make it, get a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.
This is basically gin in which a whole lot of herbs and some citrus have been macerated; quite what herbs and citrus we are talking about is – of course, as usual – a closely guarded secret. Pour a slug of this potion into a jug, add a generous portion of lemonade, and then bung in sliced and diced vegetables and fruit; which vegetables and fruit exactly is up to you, but I’ve seen mention of cucumbers and celery on the vegetable side and orange and strawberries on the fruit side. The end result will look something like this.
This seems to be quite a posh drink. For instance, we see here King Charles, at a time when he was still a young Prince Charles, gulping down a Pimm’s at a polo game – note polo game, not a football game or rugby game or some other game which we normal mortals take part in or watch.
Here he is again, “a little bit older, a little more bent” as the song goes, pensively clutching his glass of Pimm’s.
It’s very popular at Royal Ascot, which – obviously, given its name – the Royals attend.
Following suit from the Royals, the other race goers deck themselves out in their finest, the ladies with those ridiculous hats English women love to wear, the gents in morning suits, which are equally ridiculous.
Everyone has a flutter on the horses.
And the Pimm’s flows freely all day.
These two drinkers of Pimm’s seem to have backed the wrong horse, though.
It’s also very popular at the Henley Royal Regatta, where anyone who is anyone wears a blazer (I think to signal that they belong to a boat club somewhere).
And of course Pimm’s flows freely.
Although not quite in the same posh league these days, Pimm’s is also quaffed in large quantities at Wimbledon. Just because I find him very simpatico, I throw in a photo of Stanley Tucci at Wimbledon clutching his Pimm’s.
I think readers will get the general idea from what I have written above that gin is a very respectable drink these days. Which was certainly not the case a mere three hundred years ago. In the early 1700s, the British government decided – as an anti-French move (so what’s new…) – to greatly increase import duties on French brandy. At the same time, it made it much, much easier for people to get into the business of making gin: it broke the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers on the making of spirits, it reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits, and it revoked the need for a license to make spirits. Add to this the fact that this was a period which saw a drop in the prices of barley – used to make the mash, which was then distilled to obtain the spirits – which very much helped to make the final product cheap. Add also to this the fact that there was a general rise in salaries (from absolutely wretched to slightly less so) and a concomitant general drop in food prices, which meant that the poor had somewhat more disposable income to spend on liquor. Add all of that up and you have the makings of a perfect storm. Thousands of people all over the country got themselves a pot still and started making gin. This is a pretty simple type of pot still.
This pot still is a little more sophisticated.
Many of these new gin makers opened gin-shops to sell their rot-gut. Here, we have a print of a gin shop made towards the end of the 1700s (note that it’s all women and one child; commentators of the time were particularly exercised that this was not just a problem with men).
Many others simply made it at home in their kitchen for their personal consumption.
And rot-gut it was! Pot stills produced a very coarse product, and some pretty awful things were added to make it more palatable. Turpentine was one, to give the stuff “woody notes”. Sulphuric acid was another, although luckily the acid didn’t distill over with the ethanol; it merely reacted with it to form diethyl ether, which added a sweetish taste to the product.
The awful taste didn’t seem to matter very much. People, especially the poor, began drinking huge amounts of gin. What came to be known as the Gin Craze had started. Quite soon, the authorities realised they had a serious social problem on their hands as drunkenness and disorderly behaviour – especially among the poor and involving women as much as men – became endemic. William Hogarth’s print, “Gin Lane”, gives an idea of how the governing classes saw the problem.
By 1736, the Middlesex Magistrates had this to say: “It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years … it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.”
Already in 1734, the story of one Judith Defour had shocked the nation – or at least the superior Sort of People. Judith had taken her two year old daughter out of the workhouse, where she had placed her earlier, for a visit of a few hours, and had met up with her friend Sukey. The court records document what followed:
“On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a Ditch. And after that, we went together and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of gin.”
The little girl died in the ditch. Defour was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and hanged at Tyburn (note the grandstands; this was spectacle indeed).
The public outrage over this story forced Parliament to act. Over the next fifteen years, various laws were passed which eventually brought gin drinking under control.
It’s hard not to read about the Gin Craze and think about today’s opioid crisis, or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or the many previous epidemics of heroin, amphetamines, morphine, and on and on. Different chemicals, same problem: the desire – the need – to dull the pain of living, and a ready supply of cheap chemicals to do it.
And on that sombre note, I will finally crack open a bottle of – colourless – craft gin someone gave us, aromatised – so the label informs me – with juniper of course, but also orange peel, cardamom, angelica root, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, and maybe a few other things, and, more or less in Larkin’s words:
I’ll drop four cubes of ice / Chimingly in a glass, and add / Three goes of gin, a lemon slice, / And let a ten-ounce tonic void / In foaming gulps until it smothers / Everything else up to the edge. / And then I’ll lift the lot and ask myself:
“Am I a superior Sort of Person or an inferior Sort of Person?”
the heart thrills 