Gin Sander - Churchill: A Drinking Life: Champagne, Cognac, and Cocktails

Copyright 2022 by Gin Sander and Roxanne Langer

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

Cover artwork by Shutterstock and FlyClipArt.com

Interior design by Chris Schultz

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-6836-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6837-6

Printed in China

INTRODUCTION

GO AHEAD, HAVE ANOTHER. I WONT TELL...

Winston Churchill said those encouraging words to a young government minister who seemed reluctant to refill his glass at a dinner party. And we would say the same to you, go ahead and have one and then perhaps another while you are enjoying this book. We hope you are in a very relaxed mood and a very relaxed setting... maybe a well-worn leather chair, sleeping dog at your feet, and a glass of your favorite libation within arms reach.

Weve all missed the chance to have a drink with Sir Winston Churchill by many decades at this point, as he died at the age of ninety in 1965. This book can be a stand-in of sorts, in which you will learn what the great man liked to drink, where he liked to drink, and with whom he liked to raise a glass. Some will be familiar to youbig liquor brand names, famous bars and hotels around the world, and bold-faced names of historical figures. Others will be more obscure... lesser-known brands, out-of-the-way drinking spots, and interesting people who have faded from view.

Understand this: Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was by no means a drunk. He was an extraordinary man who played an extraordinary role in world history and took extraordinary pleasure in Champagne, wine, and spirits. From some of his earliest exploitsescaping from a South African POW camp and hiding in a deep mine shaft with cigars and brandy, through his strong and steady leadership during World War II with a watered-down scotch forever on his desk, and then on to his later quieter pleasures of painting in the South of France, a glass or a bottle of something was always at hand.

Industry speculation is that over the course of his lifetime, Winston Churchill drank some forty-two thousand bottles of Champagne. The mind boggles. It boggles the soberest of minds, let alone one thats enjoyed a drink or two. Relax, we did it for you:

He had his first taste of brandy at age eleven as a standard nineteenth-century medical treatment during a serious bout of pneumonia, and at age sixteen he wrote to his brother Jack about a dinner at which there was lots of Champagne which pleased your loving brother very much. Lets give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was at least in his late teens before he drank Champagne on a regular basis. This leaves seventy-two years in which he enjoyed Champagne daily. Seventy-two years of enjoyment, 365 days a year... that gives us 26,280 days total. If we divide the number of bottles by the number of days, it comes out to 1.6 bottles a day or 584 bottles a year. Not entirely out of the question, it seems somewhat doable, doesnt it? Churchill once said that drinking Champagne made his wits more nimble, and based on those numbers he must have been very nimble indeed. In our Champagne section, we will go into some depth about the size of the bottles he was drinking, but for now let us just bow down and acknowledge that he wins the game.

Moving from Champagne to spirits, youve all heard those wry and witty remarks about gin and dry martinis that are attributed to Winston, right? Something about the only way to make a martini is with ice-cold gin and a bow in the direction of France, or a glance across the room at the bottle of vermouth. All variations on a theme, and all, it appears, strictly apocryphal. Many have searched in vain for evidence that he ever said those oft-quoted words, and in examining the many, many (many) detailed bills from his various wine and spirits suppliers, gin never makes an appearance. Damn.

In the spirit of enjoying a good story, however, we dont plan to overlook gin and martinis in this book. Gin has played a long and storied role in the history of England, so it is certain that Winston was often in the room where gin was poured. That makes it Churchill adjacent, eh? No doubt there were many instances in which someone poured a drink of gin and then looked across the room at Churchill before taking a sip.

Many a bar around the world is named in honor of Sir Winston Churchill, The Churchill Bar, at the Hyatt Regency London and Winstons on the Beach at Miamis Surf Club are just two that come immediately to mind. And many a cocktail is named after him even though by many accounts he was not a big fan of mixed drinks. It is well established that Churchill did knock down a martini or two with FDR in the White House and at what is now called Camp David, but whether he did so willingly is up for debate. Again, in the spirit of enjoyment we will relax and include some of the cocktails named in his honor, as well as a few drinks that we feel speak to the Churchillian spirit.

MILESTONES

Before we peer too deeply into the Churchill glass, lets remember some of what he did during his ninety years. Here are just a few major milestones in his career.

Historians, former personal secretaries, acquaintances, and family members alike freely mention Churchills fondness for alcohol when discussing his accomplishments. President Truman himself described the banquet on the first day of The Potsdam Conference he attended with Churchill and Stalin where The table was set with everything you could think of... Goose liver, caviar, every kind of meat one could imagine, along with cheeses of different shapes and colors, and endless wine and vodka.

Vodka was often on the table when negotiating with Stalin. Previously secret files released by the British National Archives in the twenty-first century detail a late night meeting in Moscow between Stalin, his foreign secretary Molotov, and Churchill in which a British undersecretary at the Foreign Office reported, There I found Stalin and

1899 while covering the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent, is captured and made a POW but escapes, re-joins the army, and liberates the very prison camp where he was held.