I’ve been having a recurring dream. I’m sitting in the pastis bar on edge of the
Rhône at Tournon, drinking the Ricard 51.
Which number is an indicator of its alcohols. My companion is Lord Twining, noticeable for
his full silver beard. We have been at
it a long time. He drinks the candle and
sets fire to his face.
Can’t quite place it, but I have a nagging
suspicion this happened, if somewhere else.
Might have been in the Botanic in the noughties, when the ancient peer’s
girlfriend often sat under the table. I
don’t think it was sado-mas. She just
seemed to feel safer down there when the table was awash. She was a tiny dancer. It woulda been safer.
It started under the marula tree. My photographer mate, Milton Wordley
suggested I write about why we sit around tables, drinking wine with each
other. I always thought it would have
been a very early mob of us watching the elephants get drunk after eating too
much over-ripe marula fruit then drinking water so this king-hell ferment takes
off in their giant gizzards and when we were gibbons or whatever we were we
copied them and invented wine.
Because it looked like fun.
It has to do with the childish human obsession with replicating the gravity-free timelessness we enjoy in our dreams.
I was heartbroken to discover that the
purist bastards at National Geographic calculated that it would take nearly two
litres of pure ethanol to get a proper pachyderm tipsy, in which case it would
take 27 liters of marula juice at seven per cent alcohol to come up with that
much goonbag. They reckon an elephant
would therefore have to guts at least 1,400 rotten boozy fruits to get
shickered, which they think was below the style of your average tasteful
elephant, who would of course prefer the fresher fruit.
I still reckon a good elephant could get a
liking for the boozy fruit.
Somebody invented it. Humans couldna
invented it. Humans copy stuff.
A camel can drink 120 litres of water in
ten minutes, so I sort of trust the girth of the elephant to offer a much
bigger tank, and if that was already fizzing with marula fruit on the turn …
I’m resistant to the suggestion that the recipe
was written by a drinker. Given the lack
of laptops and the way experimental drinkers work, I don’t believe an early
convert to ethanol would have recorded the recipe. They were all far too busy developing the
market. The recipe would have been written
down by one of the forerunners of the National Geographic: some hornrimmed dude
with a jacket full of pockets and pens and a keen sense of observation. A friggin wine writer! An early blogger would have got it published
on the tom-toms of the day and it would have spread.
Five minutes later, everybody’s sitting
round listening to the boom-boom glossies and they’re into gastroporn and
drinking wine.
But now, it just can’t be accepted that an
elephant could get properly plonked. Something
obviously went wrong at the National Geographic. If elephants never got plonked, who the hell
did we copy?
The really tricky bit of the history of
booze is the emergence of the alembic.
The still. When it became
apparent that the primitive still could concentrate the colour black for al
kohl, the concentrate of lead sulphide worn as eyeliner in north Africa, some
clever nutter worked out that it could also be used for concentrating the
fragrant essences of plants and their flowers to make perfume, which led to the
next genius trying it on beer, or wine, to make what my Shetland grandmother daintily
called spurruts.
Looks like the Irish pinched distillation
from the Moors, while the Vikings found it in the Mediterranean and took it
back up the rivers to Russia
to invent vodka. Vodka, the water that
does not freeze on that long cold row from Scandinavia to Iceland or further, like to the prime real
estate developments of Greenland last time
things warmed up.
Or on that dragon boat of lads that set out
from Bergen, Norway,
to row to Shetland, missed it their vodka haze, and discovered America halfway
through their hangover. Vinland, see.
Rootstocks for 800 years later, when phylloxera ate Europe and the only
way you could get vines to grow was to graft them onto American rootstocks.
So you could sit around the table together
and drink.
If you had a barrel of water on the
longboat, it would freeze, and there’s not much firewood in the North Atlantic Ocean to make a blaze on the floor of your
wooden boat to melt that barrel. If your vodka started to freeze, on the other
hand, that indicated a fellow rower had taken more than a fair share and topped
it up with rain.
Sharpen up the axes.
This is not what you’d call your actual
history, but I long ago taught myself that history is gossip written by the
winner, while gossip is history related by the loser. Both these theses are applicable here. The ethanol business, that vast tentacular
money-making beast which writes all the history because that’s what it actually
did, actually does write the history.
Gossip?
Since the great newspapers carked and spat all their wine writers
against the internet, where many of them will not stick, the wine bloggers run
the gossip.
This is of course unacceptable and totally
out of control.
But your actual spread of folks sitting
round a table drinking obviously started under a tree in Africa and spread with us through ancient China and Phoenecia and the old Greece
and Caucasian Georgia. Try this good old
Viking poem, written by the Icelander bard Snorri Sturlosson in Edda nearly a thousand
years ago.
Röst gefr ödlingr iastar
- öl virdi esvá – fyrdum.
Thögn fellir brim bragna
- biórr forn er that – horna.
Máls kann mildingr heilsu
- miödr heitir svá – veita.
Strúgs kemr í val veiga
- vín kallak that – galli.
Which means that while the boss Viking
gives floods of fresh yeasty ale to the troops they prefer the older lagered beer
in their horns. To get them back on the
conversational track, the King pours mead.
But to really have the whole saga sung, he pours wine, and guarantees dignity’s
destruction.
Which is bad news for blokes like John Rau,
the attorney-general who tries hard to sort out our vicious drinking laws by
weaning us off the spurruts and onto the more genteel vinous bevvies.
Add this hard intelligence to what he’s
learnt from the Georgians, the Phœnæcians, the Greeks and the good folks round
at Pernod-Ricard, who just happen to own Jacob’s Creek here and also make the
wicked 51 there on the Rhône, and we sort of wobble straight back into Milton’s initial query
about why we sit down together at tables and drink.
Blame it on the elephants, I say. If you need any clarity, first extinguish the
candle, then ask Lord Twining.
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