Smarties

Enough of all this who makes a mean martini and who doesn't shit. It's three (maybe four) ingredients. If you can't make a good one it's because you're an unschooled lout.

Don't get me wrong: I exceeded myself just last week hitting color, aroma and blend, but per my last post, it's not about making a perfect one — in a pluralistic world no such thing exists — it's only about the minimal qualification of avoiding bad ones — and not to get me wrong again, I hold this level of ineptitude against a bar, keeping in my head a running list of places who fail even this minimal standard.

Besides, most of the important decisions about good cocktails are made at the liquor store, not while attending to the bottles, shakers and glassware. What's the right ratio of gin / vodka to vermouth? Anything from the apocryphal "glance across the room" up to four- or five-to-one. How much olive juice is tolerable in a dirty martini? Judging from the shit-talk any ol' amount you prefer. Choose high quality ingredients, meet the minimum standard, and the rest is a matter of taste — for which it is appropriately widely known there is no accounting.

So let's all stop posing as if mixing cocktails is like laying microchip circuitry or calculating digits of pi. It's an improvisational art.

Former Congressman Charlie Wilson died last week (Martin, Douglas, "Charlie Wilson, Texas Congressman Linked to Foreign Intrigue, Dies at 76," The New York Times, 11 February 2010, p. B19). Rep. Wilson came to national attention through George Crile's 2003 book, Charlie Wilson's War and later the film of the same name. Mr. Crile's book is one of the best books I've ever read. It's full of stories that illustrate the hurly-burley of how international politics and foreign policy making really happens. But more to the point, it's one of those "truth is stranger than fiction"-type stories.

My favorite story from the book is Rep. Wilson's response to a reporter, incredulous at Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's appointment of Rep. Wilson to the House Ethics Committee. Rep. Wilson had already developed a considerable reputation in Washington for boozing and womanizing when he rolled from a minor scandal involving a weekend of jacuzzi hopping at Caesar's Palace involving copious amounts of cocaine and a number of showgirls into his Congressional Ethics responsibilities. Mr. Crile reports thus:

From today's perspective, the image of this philandering hedonist climbing out of his Las Vegas hot tub to render judgments on the conduct of his colleagues seems almost perverse. Even without knowing about the Fantasy Suite, a genuinely puzzled reporter had asked Wilson why he, of all people, had been selected for this sober assignment. Without missing a beat, Wilson had cheerfully replied, "It's because I'm the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented." (p. 81)

In general it would seem that people's personal moral conduct and public policy advocacy are inversely related. It would be good if more of us types demanded our representation.

Happy Repeal Day everybody! Here's a drink for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the State of Utah that brought rampant boozing back to the United States.

I'm presently exploring the Tom Collins. I'm making it with fresh lemon juice and liking it somewhat less than the soda sweetness of the one made with the bottled mix that first introduced me to the drink over Thanksgiving dinner preparations.

I'm skeptical of drinks that require added sugar. I mean, with the alcohol they're already sweet enough. I tried to omit the sugar from last night's Tom Collins and found, like with drinkboy's discussion of the old fashioned, not only is the sugar important, but dissolving the sugar in some water before adding the rest of the ingredients is critical too.

I inherited a subset of S.B.'s booze collection when she left for Ireland a few days ago so I am now in gin and tequila for the remainder of the year and then some so I am a happy kid.

For the last few years it's been kissing your way to the White House. This year for a few days it seemed like it might be sobbing your way to the White House. My hope is that it might now turn to drinking your way to the White House. After a dry drunk as president, this is a welcome change. Words won't help you now Obama. Time to pony up. You've done coke so showing this old lady up should be no problem. Or maybe it'll be like Marion Ravenwood drinking a bunch of Nepalese tough guys under the table at her bar, The Raven, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Campaigning at Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana, Senator Clinton was polishing of a brew when someone offered "You want a shot with that?" John Stewart mocked her for her choice of Crown Royal. But if you watch the video, when it's suggested that she drink a shot she says, "I want something sweet." It turns out that her idea of something sweet is actually the sweat end of bitter. When most people say "something sweet" what they mean is a Mellon Ball or a Lemon Drop. When Hillary Clinton say "something sweat" what she means is a sweat whiskey. I'm sold.

I was so amused by this that I actually can't decide which picture I liked the most. So here she is, both a beer and a whiskey. More at The Gawker ("A Shot in the Dark: Hot Hillary Clinton Party Photos!," 14 April 2008).

Dewars Scotch has the brilliantly targeted (at me and my ilk) advertising campaign of promoting the notion of Repeal Day (Dewars | independent), celebrating the end of prohibition. That's a holiday I can get behind!

Fittingly Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last president to have been photographed with a cocktail and a cigarette, ran on the repeal of prohibition, signed the Volstead Act legalizing the brewing of beer and presided over the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. On 5 December 1933 Utah, of all states, ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution ending prohibition. Another reason that FDR is one of the best presidents in U.S. history!

It's snowing out and the bars in D.C. all suck so I will probably be staying in, but while setting the scene for the photograph above, I happily came across a forgotten bottle of now thirteen-year-old Glenlivet single malt scotch: the kind of thing to keep you warm on a winter night. Sorry Dewars, but your promotional failed on me as I will be drinking the competition tonight.

I'm considering educating myself a little on Graham Greene and so, at the inspiration of a passage posted by Andrew Sullivan ("'The Torturable Class'," The Daily Dish, 26 July 2007), purchased a copy of Our Man in Havana. Christopher Hitchens wrote the introduction and — apropos an earlier post ("Booz-Hound Christopher Hitchens," 28 June 2007) — he tells the following tale:

Graham Greene famously subdivided his fictions into 'novels' and 'entertainments' ...

I should like to propose a third, or subcategory: the whisky (as opposed to the nonwhisky) fictions. Alcohol is seldom far from the reach of Greene's characters, and its influence was clearly some kind of daemon in his work and in his life. A stanza of that witty and beautiful poem 'On the Circuit,' written in 1963, registers W. H. Auden's dread at the thought of lecturing on a booze-free American campus and asks, anxiously and in italics:

Is this my milieu where I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic swig?

Describing a visit to a 1987 conference of 'intellectuals' in Moscow in the early Gorbachev years, both Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon were to record Green making exactly this dive into his bottle-crammed briefcase.

Makes me think, as Nietzsche said, that all writing is autobiographical of a sort.

I learned to drink from four people: my parents and two college fiends, Bill and Mariella. I say that I learned to drink from them because upon reflection, I am frequently impressed at the gems of booze-related insight that I have taken from these four. One evening, while over at Bill and Mariella's place, the drink on offer was Gordon's Gin in the one gallon plastic easy pour bottle. I sniffed: "Gordon's is some pretty bad stuff." Bill remonstrated with glee, "Bad gin? What are you talking about? They don't make bad gin." This is one of those peaces of alky wisdom that I have carried with me since.

But while they don't make bad gin, not all gin is equal. And so at the beginning of May the New York Times ran a review of gins (Asimov, Eric, "No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis," 2 May 2007), and despite my concern that the over-excited pretension of a New York Times food review might sour one of my affections, I pressed on and found the article interesting and useful. Unfortunately the useful went catastrophically awry.

I have been in something of a gin doldrum lately. I now blame this on the fact that I have stuck too loyally with Bombay Sapphire. While a complex and flavorful gin, it is also powerful, sharp and nearly overcome by its alcohol. It's great for a gin and tonic, too busy to blend well in a martini and I have recoiled from it on the rocks. With the New York Times article marked up and in hand I stopped in my neighborhood liquor store looking for what the tasting panel selected as their number one, Plymouth English Gin.

I have to say, I have been amazed at how good the Plymouth is. It really is a perfect, well balanced gin with the canonical amount of juniper. I can't remember the last time I polished off a bottle of liquor so quickly — no, really, I can't remember. A week later I was back for another bottle — in college I could have dusted it in a night or two, but I'm not so resilient or stupid anymore. At the end of week two I was back for a third bottle. This time the clerk told me that he only had two left and couldn't get any more. It turns out that I am not the only person who reads the New York Times and distilling a gin isn't something that can be done over night. There had been a run on Plymouth and the distillery was rushing to catch up. I took two and the next day at lunch went to the liquor store near my office and snapped up a few more for a store to carry me through the lean season.

My supply was dwindling and I was beginning to get nervous and eye the shallow gin row every time I opened the liquor cabinet and ration my intake. This week I stopped by previously mentioned neighborhood liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine to accompany the dinner-directed bag of groceries in hand. While being rung up I got a premonition and circled back to the end of the counter where the gins are massed and there was a suspicious looking familiar bottle. "What is that square bottle right there?" I inquired. Despite this being my favorite liquor store, the clerk is constantly trying to push me into the popular brand names and refuses to learn that I am always on the prowl for the Plymouth now. He gave it a half turn. "Oh, we just got in a new shipment of the Plymouth." Saved! Confident that the drought was past I availed myself of only one.