It was Dylan Thomas, allegedly, who said “an alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do”; I prefer the alternative formulation that “an alcoholic is someone who drinks more than you do”, and have been grateful always for a healthy supply of people whose truly astonishing intake has ensured that I stay on the right side of that grim diagnosis. But as Christmas approaches, and party follows party (with barely a moment in between for the popping of paracetamol and the sinking of coffee, lucozade, raw eggs or whatever peculiar medicine you choose), there’s every excuse for tasting the sundry delights of grape and grain. Not that one strictly needs an excuse; the arrival of sundown (hurrah for the dark winter months) is generally justification enough.
There are some perfect Christmas presents around for the oenophiles and the piss-artists in your life (by which I mean your friends and family). At their worst they make excellent coasters, and at their best they will give mischievous minds some bright ideas and kill the time between armchair and wine bar in a jolly fashion.
They are all beautiful. They pamper us with illustrations, charts, and detailed histories of the alcohol in question, reminding us that booze has been the foundation of every truly civilised society (and explaining therefore why the United States was dumb enough to consider prohibition). Ian Wisniewski’s Classic Tequila (Prion, £9.99), for instance, trading on the explosion of interest in Tex-Mex food, margaritas and the young person’s ebullient sense of fun in slamming the little devils and tipping them back swiftly, locates the drink’s origins in the early religious rites of the Aztecs.
The agave plant, whose fermented sap was to prove such a treat, was considered to be a gift from the gods. Initially, indeed, social drinking was prohibited, and drunkenness could earn a death sentence. So getting sozzled was reserved for the priests and the victims of human sacrifice. Wisniewski is quite understanding about this, saying: “[It] sounds barbaric but the rationale was that a blood sacrifice [would] ensure the sun would rise on the following day.” So that’s all right, then. These days, of course, the serious tequila drinker might find the arrival of the sun the next day less than welcome. An acquaintance of mine indulged too heavily in the spirit on her way home to a dinner with her partner and his parents. She woke up in the wee small hours to find that her boyfriend and his folks had retired to bed some time earlier and that she had her face in her meal, having “slipped into a korma”, as she put it.
Other myths are entertained; Xochiquetzal, for instance (hard enough to pronounce when sober), is mentioned as “the goddess of both drunkenness and sexuality (which can’t be the first time the two have been linked)”. No, indeed, nor the last, as the Porter in Macbeth reminds us: “It provokes the desire but takes away the performance.” It also has the merit of making people substantially more attractive than they really are, of course. But another myth – about the worm in the bottom of the bottle – is laid to rest; firstly, that’s not tequila, it’s mezcal, and secondly, even mezcal doesn’t make you hallucinate (that’s mescal). The worm, it is suggested, proves, by its immaculate preservation, that the drink is pure and strong enough, though it has also become a gastronomic delicacy in its own right. Chacun à son goût.
Entertaining though all this is, one gets a different set of accounts in the tequila section of Dave Broom’s Spirits and Cocktails (Carlton, £25), a formidable book with an opaque cover that gives it the delicious appearance of having been plucked from a freezing compartment and served up straight away. Here we learn that the goddess of the agave plant, Mayahuel, had tequila for blood; in Classic Tequila, it is the milk from her 400 breasts. But Spirits and Cocktails does tell us that the trickster Tetzcatzoncatl had 400 rabbits, each representing a different form of intoxication. 400! I only know of one, that six-foot high white rabbit, name of Harvey.
Spirits and Cocktails, though, is a labour of love, with hundreds of mouth-watering photographs, all the gen about distillation and history, and a range of fine recipes for cocktails – including an engagement with that controversial confection, the Martini – and a handy checklist for anyone lunatic enough to want to make the whole lot properly themselves. The Classic Bar and Cocktail Book (Apple Press, £8.99) also offers the works, including – at first I thought this was an indexer’s joke – the Bullshit, a variation of the Bloody Mary made with only the lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce (and, presumably, the vodka).
Classic Tequila goes further, suggesting which foods might accompany the drink, and eventually offering recipes which employ it – from Black Bean Soup to the gratifying Tequila Lime Sorbet.
If one does end up in the kitchen – and by and large one does, either hunting for another bottle, or unwisely trying to make a pizza after the pub has closed – I can think of few better gifts this Christmas than a delightful set of fridge magnets from Apple Press. Part of a long-running series (Fridge Fun Books, £2.99) these are mini-cookbooks, each for an ingredient (such as tomato, banana, garlic), printed in the shape of that ingredient, and attachable to the door of the fridge. The latest set includes Tea, Coffee and Fruit Drinks, and the texts, by Gina Steer, suggest a range of varied and improbable uses for these innocent drinks. At best they might encourage some good habits – such as eating, for instance, or recalling the existence of non-alcoholic refreshments – but at worst they still make an engaging and attractive alternative decoration to shopping lists, postcards, and pictures by three-year-old children.
But sticking to the hard stuff, another thumping book for your most-loved lager lout is The Taste of Beer by Roger Protz (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £18.99), which begins with the immortal words: “This is the age of beer.” The historical content is thoroughly engaging, citing the theory that beer, rather than being a by-product of bread-making, actually preceded it. It does seem more plausible that alcohol precipitated the settling of previously nomadic peoples; wherever I have lived I have always found my local pub long before stumbling on the bakery. Protz also suggests that the art of brewing only reached the British Isles in the eighth century, which might explain the Dark Ages as the biggest drink-induced blackout of history.
The gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once said: “A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.” There is no shortage of wine books to help the ignorant, such as myself, through the minefield of etiquette, appreciation and pretension that accompanies the simple drinking of a bottle or two of wine. Apple Press offers two fat little guides, full-bodied in their tours of grapes, locations, vintages and tasting methods, and with a long finish in which the cream of the crop are listed alphabetically in directories; The White Wine Companion and The Red Wine Companion ring in at £15 a head.
Mitchell Beazley offers a very full cellar of pocket guides, for those with deep pockets, many of them specialising in wines from certain areas, but some delivering a starter for the generalist. Hugh Johnson’s How To Enjoy Your Wine (as if we needed any help, eh?) is a clear, crisp read (Mitchell Beazley, £9.99), with a reassuring final chapter on “Tactics in the Restaurant”. I found this chapter heartening in that it correctly pointed out that a couple can easily sink two bottles of wine over dinner, and shouldn’t worry about doing so, and suggested that, among other things, choosing wine by reference to the right-hand column of the list was a legitimate and sensible tactic.
What I’ve always wanted, though, is to be able to talk about wine like Jilly Goolden (but in a deeper voice). The fantastically broad palette with which she articulates the responses of her palate – “mmm, I’m getting a mixture of mildewed jockstraps and burnt Pirelli tyres here” – always left me nearly as open-mouthed as Ms Goolden herself. Michael Broadbent’s Winetasting and Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book both give glossaries, although extremely different in approach (both Mitchell Beazley, £8.99). Johnson’s is brief and no-nonsense, and made me realise I would describe anything I drank, not to mention myself, as “easy”; Broadbent’s offers such delights as “sweaty saddle: a rudely evocative smell” that he relates to some Australian Shiraz wines. Nothing quite like Jilly, of course, but a boy can dream.
The only way to round off such an extensive tour of the bottles, taps and optics is with a dram, of course. No one has captured better the concentration of history and geography in the malt than Don Paterson in his award-winning poem “A Private Bottling”, but several books will give the whisky-lover an evocative and tempting tour of the isles. Charles MacLean’s Scotch Whisky (Mitchell Beazley, £8.99) and Helen Arthur’s Single Malt Whisky (Apple Press, £5.99) both deal with the nitty-gritty of the when, how and who, but the latter is clearer in its layout; beautiful illustrations of each bottle, an easy-to-follow key for the main points, and tasting notes in each case. These books also nailed the lie – told me in earnest by a Scottish room-mate – that a real Scot would never add a mixer to a malt. Apparently, “serious drinkers on the West Coast of Scotland favour dilution with lemonade.” Well, I’m not mad enough to argue with men like that. Cheers.