Cocktails
High spirits
Victoria Mather
Summer drinks are celebratory, winter drinks are prophylactic. In summer one drinks to party, in winter one drinks to sur- vive; any fool who accepts an invitation to stay in an English country house should know to take their own rations of whisky and good burgundy to have any hope of sustaining life until after lunch on Sunday. But the summer is days of wine and rose.
Summer drinking is outdoors — pretty girls in floaty frocks and icy sancerre. Sum- mer drinking is Glyndebourne and picnics, which seductively don't seem like drinking because they're outdoors and therefore supposedly healthy. Actually, drinking in the fresh air is completely lethal — and so much more enjoyable for it. There are peo- ple who could never endure the last act of Shakespeare in Regent's Park were they not in a benevolent haze — the Globe should open a cocktail bar immediately.
Cocktails are 'it' this summer. Cham- pagne is consistently 'it', preferably Lau- rent Perrier pink, whatever the summer, but the cocktail is having its little moment in the sun. This is not, however, an excuse for something virulent and disgusting in a hideously shaped glass crowned by a para- sol. Cocktails are a science, an art, a sacred trust from barman to connoisseur. My Yorkshire aunts, who underwrite their longevity with gin and bridge, always serve White Ladies (gin, Cointreau, egg-white and lemon juice). The entire point of us 25 nephews and nieces is thus to spend hours of York race week squeezing fresh lemons. The aunts maintain that cocktails are much more economical, darling, because people become happier quicker. And indeed one year we did find the vicar beatifically asleep in the rosebed. Cocktails are not punches, the tipple of young estate agents who throw the contents of their drinks cupboard into a bucket with some orange juice and expect you to drink it. Cocktails are not Pimm's, which is almost as revolting as the thrusting estate agents' punches and all too frequently pressed into one's hand by people who should know better. And tarting it up with champagne is a terrific waste of both the champagne and even the fruit; indeed, champagne with anything else is exceeding- ly dodgy. Buck's fizz always implies that the host is too mean or the champagne too filthy to serve the stuff straight.
But a good cocktail has purity. To experi- ence the cocktail at its zenith one has to go very quietly — and preferably by chauffeur- driven car — to Dukes Hotel, off St James's. There, in the panelled solemnity of the bar, is the maestro of the martini, Gilberto Preti. This martini is not shaken or stirred: the antics of Tom Cruise in the film Cocktail would undoubtedly lacerate Signor Preti's delicate sensibilities; even the wheeze of dribbling the vermouth onto the ice, swilling it around the shaker and then throwing the vermouth down the sink strikes him as a vulgarity. The essence of his haute couture martini is simplicity: a frozen glass, frozen vodka (black-label Smirnoff) or frozen gin (Beefeater — Gor- don's goes solid in the freezer), two drops of vermouth and the zest from a twist of lemon snapped over the top. The result is so frightfully good that people have been known to have another.
The martini is open to interpretation: at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where the bar is the watering-hole of Clint
'Paean village' Pen and ink by Fiona Graham
Eastwood, John Cleese, Goldie Hawn et al., the martini is pink this summer, enlivened by a dash of cranberry juice. I'm all for pink drinks on aesthetic grounds (Corney & Barrow's Château de Sours 1996, fulsomely praised by Auberon Waugh, is ravishing to look at and the most seductive rosé this year), but a classic mar- tini doesn't need buggering about. Dukes is selling 60 a week without any fancy addi- tives (melon juice is another tiresome American wheeze to make the cocktail seem healthy) so speed along. In the unthinkable circumstances of one's drink becoming slightly warm, Preti rechills it in an insulated Power Rangers mug.
The sole disadvantage of martinis is that they may not be drunk in quantity, unless one deliberately wants to expunge any memory of the evening, and summer is a time for quaffing. We live in the age of vodka: Absolut has a stranglehold on the tastebuds of New Yorkers but here the man-boy separator is the immaculate Kristal, viscous and oily from the freezer. The label states, 'Keep cool before drink- ing', which applies equally to the drink and the drinker, and Kristal — a bottle of which should be purchased after luncheon at Caviar Kaspia — is perfect on the rocks. No vodka, in fact, discounting the red-label Smirnoff which is a pub draught, should ever be drunk with tonic. Tonic, only Schweppes and only full-leaded since diet drinks are a foul aberration, is for gin, which should only be Gordon's. The gin and tonic, long, with lots of ice and a twist of lime, is vastly underrated and resolutely unfashionable, which is an enormous rec- ommendation. Since the vodka boom we find it too scented, yet no other drink is quite so effective in the heat or has such a world-wide endurance, from Esher to India. Never let us forget that the G and T is the alchemy that has sustained Sir Denis Thatcher as a national treasure.
So this is a summer of high spirits, a land that time forgot in the rush towards Odd- bins. Far, far too often one is confronted with urine-coloured chardonnay as an excuse for a party when gin or vodka, even bourbon in the acutely desirable Manhat- tan, would be more reliable and economi- cal. Hosts are just lazy because spirits involve mixes (think of the myriads of households in Fulham which only ever have flat tonic) and a little time and trouble, whereas wine can just be chucked out of the bottle into a hired glass. So roll out the margaritas, the mint juleps, the sidecars and the martinis, but absolutely nothing that might be concocted by an Australian student in a wine bar and called a Slow Comfortable Screw.
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