Osborne - The wet and the dry: a drinkers journey

The Forgiven
Bangkok Days
The Naked Tourist
The Accidental Connoisseur
American Normal
The Poisoned Embrace
Paris Dreambook
Ania Malina

Copyright 2013 by Lawrence Osborne

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were previously published in different form as Drinking in Islamabad in Playboy (July 2010); and as Getting a Drink in a Civil War in Harpers (March 2011).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborne, Lawrence, 1958
The wet and the dry : a drinkers jouney / Lawrence Osborne.
p. cm.
1. Drinking customsCross-cultural studies. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beveragesCross-cultural studies. 3. Temperance
Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.
GT2884.O73 2012
394.12dc23 2012038224

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3689-6

Jacket design by Ben Wiseman
Jacket photograph: (bottle) Armin Zogbaum

v3.1

Live secretly
EPICURUS

Gin and Tonic

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around my hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir-sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

Fashion magazines stood undisturbed on the coffee table, and in the dining room next door I could hear wealthy Russians cracking open lobster claws with silver tools and commenting ignorantly upon the wines that Europes only seven-star hotel offers to its guests. I could hear them say Sassicaia, then slap down the list and burst out laughing. It was six hundred euros a bottle. The waiter asked me how I would like my gin and tonic. I said that I take mine three parts tonic to one part gin, Gordons, three ice cubes, and a dash of lime rind. The tonic brand is not an issue. The drink comes with a dim music of ice cubes and a perfume that touches the nose like a smell of warmed grass. Ease returns. It is like cold steel in liquid form.

I went to the lounge at six with some regularity, even when I had to give a lecture at the Teatro Dal Verme. One night I was interviewed by a television crew and a radio station, and the gin tasted sweeter, more maddening. I fumbled my sentences until the faces around me changed, and I could sense them asking themselves Is he one of them? I sat there and blathered about my latest book, which I could no longer remember, and the glass shook slightly in my hand and the ice cubes rattled. The pretty girls thought it was funny.

Do you have a special affinity for Milan?

Ive never been here before.

Do you always have a gin and tonic at cocktail hour?

Laughter.

Its part of my heritage.

They thought this was pretty quaint, especially as the glass was still shaking in the hand of a drinker.

Its an English drink, I said. The national drink.

They wrote it down. Centuries ago she was known on the streets of London as Madame Geneva, a feminine killer.

Cut, the director muttered.

I always end up alone with a glass and a wet lip. I sat by the windows with my forty-euro drink and admired the Galleria, the ground floor of which is occupied by a mass of bars and cafs. The architect Giuseppe Mengoni, who built it, fell to his death from the glass dome two days before it was opened in 1877. The ironwork inspired the Eiffel Tower. The cafs were lit, the Prada outlet below the hotel glittering with crystal and mirror. Chinese tourists swarmed around the small mosaic image of a bull at the center of the gallery floor, taking photographs of it. I could see the men in suits on the terrazze with glasses of Spritz and Negroni sbagliato and neat Campari. This was collective, merry, out-in-the-open display drinking on wicker chairs, with napkins and service and ice tongs. No one was standing, and no one was falling down. No one was shouting, no one was incontinent. The Italian style of drinking is, as we all know, organized along these lines. Men sit face to face with women and talk to them at a decibel level appropriate to sexual interest. The Galleria was intended originally as a prototype of what we would now call the mall, but it was also a covered and protected space in which to eat and drink. The protocol of the aperitivo and the digestivo was perfectly suited to its echo-friendly spaces and its allegorical frescoes.

Other countries drink to get drunk, Roland Barthes once wrote, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking. The same can be said of Italians.

I sipped my watered gin, and as always happens when I enter into this drink (I think of drinks as elements that are entered, like bodies of water or locales), my mind tilted its way back to the past, to the England of my childhood that I no longer possessed and that no doubt no longer existed. But why it did this was a complete enigma. As teetotalers so insistently remind those of us for whom drink is the staff of life, the mind itself is a chemical body. We are fated to control it.

Many of the hotels guests were rich Arabs, and I would sometimes see them wandering around the restaurant with their children and their masked wives looking for a table. They would pause by the balcony and peer down at the Gucci store and then over the caf terraces. Their expression seemed almost disdainful. It is the rich Gulf Arabs who are to a great degree the bridge between Europe and the Middle East, but I had the feeling that when they looked down at the tables crowded with multicolored alcoholic beverages, they were nonplussed, aloof. Even in Dubai, where many of them might have been from, people would not openly consume such things in public, in such spectacular spaces defined by such large crowds. It was the publicness and the ease, I think, that made them wrinkle their noses for a moment and pass on, retreating to the family dinner table laden with bottles of chilled mineral water. But I am guessing.