Drink (51 page)

The field of nutrition also provided backing to opponents of alcohol. For much of its existence, the British temperance movement had been handicapped by the prejudice of the average Briton in favor of corpulence. Stout equaled healthy, and abstainers found it hard to match the obese, ruddy John Bulls paraded by the brewers with champions from their own ranks. However, as competitive sports, whose contestants were leaner than the medieval ideal, became popular spectacles, public perception changed and figures such as W. G. Grace, the first cricketing superstar, six-two and a mere 250 pounds, came to represent the trim new model of physical excellence. Athletes slaked their thirsts with tea instead of ale, and the rapid growth in popularity of the infusion gave hope to the temperance movement. British per capita consumption of tea more than doubled between 1850 and 1875. The leap in demand, however, was rather the consequence of economic factors than closet abstinence. Duty on tea had been reduced over the same period, and plantations of it had been established in India. Cheap, plentiful Indian tea flooded the home market. Not only was it of excellent quality, it also had the benefit of being produced within the bounds of the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, so that to drink a British Indian cuppa was an act of imperial patriotism. The merchant ships that carried tea from India to Great Britain were loaded with beer for the voyage out. Expatriate Britons in the subcontinent had prodigious thirsts for their native brews and paid the highest prices for any that reached them without spoiling. The passage to India crossed the equator twice, via some of the calmest and roughest parts of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and exposed the outbound cargo of beer to extreme variations in temperature and motion. In order to survive, it had to be brewed in a particular style, which came to be known as India Pale Ale, or
IPA
. The recipe for IPA was based on the traditional English October ale, a strong (OG 1140 or more), heavily hopped brew, matured in the barrel for a year, then aged in bottles for up to ten more, which had been the favorite style of the eighteenth-century country squire. When a freshly made batch of this nectar was first shipped to India, it was discovered that, unlike most beers, which deteriorated on the journey, October ale improved. It underwent an accelerated process of maturation so that it was ready to drink upon arrival and was the equal of brews that had spent years in English cellars.

Hodgson’s Brewery in London was the beneficiary of this discovery and, for the first two decades of the nineteenth century, had a near monopoly on the India market. The arrival of a fresh shipment of its ale was trumpeted in the expatriate press.
The Calcutta Gazette
of January 20, 1822, for example, carried a notice advising its readers that a cargo of “Hodgson’s warranted prime picked pale ale of the genuine October brewing . . . fully equal, if not superior, to any ever before received in the settlement” had appeared in port. However, such preeminence was resented by rival brewers in Britain, and when Hodgson’s decided to charter ships and do its own exporting to India, it also made enemies in the Honorable East India Company, whose employees hitherto had made substantial profits from the carriage of beer. In 1822, Campbell Majoribanks, a director of the East India Company, invited Samuel Allsopp, a brewer from the town of Burton-on-Trent, to attempt the manufacture of a competitor. By coincidence, the hard water of the Burton wells was perfectly suited to the IPA style, and when Allsopp’s new pale ale was shipped to India, it generated fan mail in return. It was, according to one grateful empire builder, “almost universally preferred by all old Indians
⁵⁵
to Hodgson’s.” It also found favor at home in Burton-on-Trent, and a pair of local brewers, Bass & Ratcliff and Salt, produced imitations of Allsopp’s brews. By the 1830s exports to India were dominated by Burton breweries. IPA was also the rising star of the British beer market. Strong in alcohol, dry in flavor, and pleasantly effervescent, it established itself as a refreshing alternative to sweet, glutinous stouts. Production in Burton-on-Trent rose from 300,000 barrels in 1849 to 1.75 million in 1869, by which time Bass & Co., which ran three breweries in the town, had become the largest brewer in the world.

In addition to changing British tastes in beer, the Indian market also influenced the way in which Britons consumed their spirits. India was administered from Calcutta, where malaria, typhoid, hepatitis, and various other killers were endemic. The local water had a reputation for unwholesomeness worse than that of raw sewage. It was a time-honored maxim of the expatriate community that alcoholic beverages were the only safe drinks, and they were consumed with vigor. Indeed, Anglo-Indians ate and drank as if the key to health on the subcontinent was to consume heavy meals, rich in meat, thrice a day, to wash these down with plenty of fortified wines and spirit-based punches, and to supplement them with more alcohol at other fixed hours. Every evening, they would participate in the ritual of the
chotapeg,
during which they protected themselves against malaria with a dose of quinine, whose bitter, astringent flavors were made more palatable by mixing it with gin. The therapeutic part of the combination was improved by Jacob Schweppe, a manufacturer of aerated waters, which launched an
INDIAN quinine TONIC
in 1870 and exported it to its place of inspiration. It was immediately popular as the perfect partner for gin, and a taste for this medicinal mixture was carried back to the United Kingdom by retiring empire builders, where the
gin and tonic
was added to the list of “traditional” British drinks.

The expanding empire did more than supply Britons with cheap tea and new recipes for long drinks. In Australia, a long-held imperial ambition was finally realized when its inhabitants started to produce marketable volumes of decent wine. The dream of securing an independent supply of wine had been one of the first motors of British imperialism, a driving force behind the movement to acquire territory and establish settlements in distant lands. The VirginiaCompany had been instructed to plant vines, in the hope that its vintages would one day reduce England’s reliance on its enemies in Catholic Europe; and subsequent settlements were likewise encouraged to cultivate the grape. The dream came true, at last, in Australia.

Vines had been carried to the New South Wales colony by the first convict fleet. There were some early successes in the manufacture of wine, but it was not until the settlement of the Hunter Valley in the 1830s that terrain suited to making good wine was planted with quality grapes. The following decade, aiming to wean its population off a lingering taste for rum, the government of New South Wales encouraged the plantation of more vines by enabling vintners to sell wine without requiring a publican’s license. Production boomed, reaching a hundred thousand gallons by 1850.

The vine was introduced to other areas of Australia as they were settled. Adelaide, founded in 1836, was ringed with vineyards within a few years. By 1844, one of its growers (Walter Duffield) had sufficient confidence in his product to send a case of it to Queen Victoria as evidence of the fertility of her latest colony. He was rewarded with a gold medal from Prince Albert and a prosecution in South Australia for making wine without a license. In the 1840s a number of Silesians settled in the Barossa Valley and introduced the Riesling grape and Rhine styles of wine to Jacob’s Creek. At about the same time, Dr. Christopher Rawson Penfold laid out a vineyard in Magill, aiming to produce fortified wines for his patients. By the middle of the century South Australia had several thousand acres of vines and was producing a wide variety of styles, including Australian sherry, Málaga, Burgundy, port, and brandy.

The grape was introduced to the neighboring state of Victoria following its gold rush in 1851. As had been the case in California, the immigrants who came in search of nuggets also planted vines. Although the earliest Victorian vineyards were small, and intended to supply their growers rather than function as commercial operations, the first governor of the state was a wealthy Swiss, who saw its promise for wine and encouraged planting on a larger scale. He persuaded several compatriots to emigrate to join him; they also formed equally high opinions of its potential, and one of their number, Paul de Castella, imported twenty thousand vines from the venerable Château Lafitte to his station at Yering. Planting in Victoria took off following the Duffy Land Act of 1862, which provided incentives to cultivate hitherto wild land, and two thousand acres were laid to vines within four years.

Eager to let the world know of their success with the grape, Australians sent their wines to the international exhibitions that were so popular in the late nineteenth century. They were shown in Paris, in a display shaped like a giant bottle, at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. The tasting notes of its judges on the offerings from the Hunter Valley illustrate the diversity and quality of a single region: They included “white wines akin to those of the Rhine; red light wines like those of Burgundy; Mousseux varieties with a bouquet, body, and flavor equal to the first Champagnes; Muscats, and other sweet wines.” They also featured at exhibitions in London in 1862, Vienna in 1873 (where a Victorian red won a prize), and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.

By 1885, Australia had twenty-two thousand acres planted to vines and was exporting nearly fifty thousand gallons of wine per annum to London. Some of its output, moreover, was gaining an international reputation for quality, especially the reds produced in the state of Victoria. In 1889, one of these, named St. Huberts, won a gold medal in Paris, and seemed to be the first New World wine ready to challenge the dominance of Europe in the production of superior vintages. However, this proved to be its swan song: A deadly parasite appeared amid the Victorian vineyards and, by 1900, had destroyed most of their rootstock.

25 LA FÉE VERTE

The parasite responsible for murdering the hopes of Australian vintners in the state of Victoria had already been at work elsewhere ; indeed, by the time it was killing vines in the Southern Hemisphere it had brought French wine production to its knees.
Phylloxera vastatrix,
the
devastator,
a diminutive if ravenous species of vine louse, had been restricted to the eastern portion of the United States until 1862, where it had been the mysterious cause of the death of imported vines, including those of William Penn and Thomas Jefferson. It was introduced to Europe by a vintner of Roquemaure in the Rhône Valley, within a shipment of American vine cuttings. The result was an ecological disaster. The
phylloxera
louse is not only voracious but also wonderfully prolific. A single female, breeding without the help of a mate, can, with the aid of successive generations, produce 25.6 billion descendants within eight months. Part of its life cycle is spent on wings, and it spread itself with ease through France’s vineyards. By 1869 it had reached Bordeaux, by 1874 it had created such a panic at the French Ministry of Agriculture that a reward of three hundred thousand francs had been offered to anyone who could halt its progress, and by 1884 it had destroyed 2.5 million acres of French vines and was eating its way through a further 1.5 million.

The French sought to combat this scourge with both science and folklore. Chemists discovered that a sulphur compound, injected into the soil around the roots of each vine, kept the devastator at bay, but the process was expensive, harmful to the environment, and had to be repeated every year. Folklorists had no such success. Holy water was found to be entirely ineffective, as were whale oil, cow urine, and even human urine. Schoolboys in Beaujolais were led out to treat the vines after classes, to no avail. In desperation the French were forced to accept that their only defense against an American pest was to graft onto American vines, whose roots were immune to
phylloxera
attacks. While this option had been open from the 1870s, it had required the decimation of French vineyards, and the sacrifice of French pride, to make it acceptable.

The diminished supply of good French wine forced the country’s citizens onto other beverages, one of which,
absinthe,
caused a spirits craze in France. The event had a very Gallic flavor to it that distinguished it from past Anglo-Saxon adventures with liquor drinking en masse. Absinthe, a distilled, flavored liquor, takes its name from the French word for the
wormwood
plant, which was considered to be its principal active ingredient, and which derives ultimately from the Greek
apsinthion,
meaning “undrinkable,” in reference to its ultrabitter flavor. Notwithstanding the taste, wormwood had been reputed to possess therapeutic properties since pharaonic times and had been employed against afflictions as diverse as indigestion, scabs on virgins, intestinal worms, and rheumatism. It was associated not only with herbalists but also witches, who were reckoned to use it to help them to fly, and this risqué connection gave it an exciting potential as an ingredient of a drink. The potential was realized in 1792, when Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, a French royalist refugee in Switzerland, combined wormwood with other herbs and 120° proof alcohol and started to sell his creation by the bottle. The people loved it, so that soon there were rivals and, by 1800, industrial-scale absinthe distilleries, including that of Pernod in France, which exported their products to places as far away as New Orleans.

Absinthe first made an impression in Paris in the 1840s. It had been issued as a water purifier to French troops in North Africa, who had developed a taste for it and demanded it when they returned to their capital in triumph. The presence of these uniformed heroes in cafés, calling for their favorite refreshment, gave absinthe a new appeal—a glass might evoke the romance and excitement of fighting Arabs among the sand dunes of the Sahara. It received a further boost when it was adopted as their favorite drink by both Parisian poets and painters, who represented it in their art as liquid inspiration. It will come as no surprise to learn that Charles Baudelaire was an
absintheur
⁵⁶
—indeed the rise of absinthe could be said to mark the triumph of his vision of the proper purpose of alcohol in civilization. An anecdote of the period describes Baudelaire rushing into his favorite café, apparently dehydrated, but insisting that the water jug be removed from his table because “the sight of water upsets me.” The jug gone, the poet quenched his thirst by downing several absinthes “with a detached and insouciant air.”