H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/July, 1928

The art of the bootician has now reached so high a vigor and polish in the Federal Union that practically all the more familiar varieties of stimulant are now obtainable in every town pretending to culture, and at reasonable prices. I have drunk the soundest sort of Scotch in Chattanooga, Tenn., and gin of a noble bouquet in Hollywood. In Kansas City I have encountered Martini-Rossi vermouth that was as good as any on tap in Havana, and in Boston, not long ago, I eased my esophagus with a capital bottle of Chateau Lafite, of some unknown but praiseworthy year. Even in the wilds of Mississippi, a state in which no man may occupy a position of public honor or trust unless he has been baptized by total immersion, I have washed down the charming sea-foods of the region with a very meritorious Graves—unless my memory fails, a Podensac. What goes on in New York I leave to a just God and a candid world. There must be five thousand booters on Manhattan Island alone, and another five thousand restaurants that boot. Almost anything known to the human uvula is obtainable, from Russian vodka to English ale. In the early days of Prohibition it was necessary to take whatever the broker had, giving thanks meanwhile to the Holy Saints. But of late the more advanced practitioners bring it in on order. One may order (so I hear) a case of Piesporter Goldtrépfchen IGN, and get it within four weeks. And it will be real. Even some of the champagne on sale is real.

The men responsible for this increasingly agreeable arrangement of things are unknown to me, but certainly they deserve well of their country. It threatened, a few years back, to be engulfed in a wave of moronic barnyard drinking. The theory was that the wise man would drink whatever he could get, and at once, lest the agents cut off the supply on the morrow. There ensued the great Cocktail Plague, of which clergymen in the remoter suburbs are still discoursing lasciviously. Anything was good enough to make cocktails, and curst be him who first cried, Hold! Enough! I dreaded, in those crude days, to go into society. It was a choice between growing ulcers along the duodenum or affronting one’s hostess. The dreadful stuff—often with eggs, pineapple juice, grenadine, créme de menthe and other such horrors in it, to say nothing of Tuskeegee gin—came on in vast shakers, and there was no approach to the dinner-table until they had been emptied. More often than not, other shakers followed at the table, and among Christians but recently delivered from Calvinism it was even common for yet others to be brought in after dinner! Or there was whiskey-and-soda—a drink fit only for golf-players and Englishmen.

It was during that era of gross, revolting guzzling that I withdrew myself from social intercourse, and got the name of a recluse. I hope I need not protest that I am actually nothing of the sort. On the contrary, I find dining out a very pleasant cure for the fatigues of Service. What spoiled it for me temporarily was simply the excessive vogue of the cocktail—a trial almost as burdensome, to a man tagged by the sphygmomanometer, as the presence of females aspiring to literary endeavor. I quit because my gizzard was going back on me. Now I resume because the new Stiefelkunst has restored genuine dining. At my last ten dinners I have been beset by no more cocktails than a healthy Elk would have called for in the old days—maybe two, three, four or five; in two highly civilized houses, none. In place of their hot fires I have enjoyed the caress of sound wine, sometimes even of distinguished wine. It has filled me with an immense satisfaction, bordering upon ecstasy. Even the bad wines that I have encountered (for example, white Chianti: what a dose!) have somehow soothed me: they are at least better than the harsh beverages swilled by oil magnates, longshoremen, and the young gentlemen at the universities. I have found myself, after a glass or two of a passable Volnay, speaking well of Mr. Coolidge, and chucking a lady poet under the chin. Mellowed, with the café noir, by a shot or two of authentic Kirschwasser, I have listened to music of such sort that, after the brutal liquors of 1921 or 1922, it would have caused me to shoot the piano full of holes.

II

Such is human progress. The bootleggers, aided by their friends, the Prohibition agents, have so far disposed of Volsteadism that there is no longer any excuse for drinking in the porcine manner of a sailor home from the Horn. Even United States Senators and Federal judges, so I hear, are now learning to like the lighter and more polished beverages, or, at all events, to drink them without any unseemly coughing and belching. Evening by evening, as I eat my way toward the life eternal, I project my mandible into better and better stuff. It is now months since I have encountered a cocktail with créme de menthe in it, or lime juice, or the whites of eggs. It is almost as long since I have been asked to drink whiskey at dinner. In a short while, no doubt, cocktails will disappear altogether, or be reserved for stag affairs, as the hymnody of the A. E. F. is reserved. Rotarians on the bust will drink them, but not men of condition.

But I believe that it will be a long while before any genuine understanding of and gift for wines, in the Continental sense, will show itself in the American. Only too many of them still labor under the belief that champagne is a wine, and it will take years to debamboozle them. To the chemist and toxicologist, of course it is, but surely not to the enlightened palate. The functions of wine and of champagne in this world are quite different, and even antagonistic. That of wine is to dull the sharp edges of life, to slip a sordine over the medulla oblongata, to translate pain and sorrow into an amiable, pizzicato melancholy. That of champagne is to awaken and inflame the baser nature. It is used by realtors to arouse the acquisitive passion in their prospects, by the proprietors of night clubs to make their clients spendthrift, and by men of no character to induce young women to take false steps. Is it drunk with game? Then it is only to conceal the fact that the colloids of the game have undergone dissociation. Is it guzzled at wedding breakfasts? Then the least said about wedding breakfasts the better. Is it employed to christen ships? Then sailors are not what they should be.

I pass over champagne. It will follow the cocktail into history. It emerged from the brothels with Prohibition, and will return thence as Prohibition fades. It is now nearly six months since I last had to drink any champagne, and I did it then only to please an elderly widow whose husband had been a Shriner. He left here cellar full of it, along with a huge stock of blended Maryland rye—a drink consumed in the Free State itself only by policemen and politicians. Champagne is going, and still wines are coming in. Every incoming ship brings more of them; the booticians, as I have said, even begin to take orders for special marks. But the impression still seems to prevail in the Republic that serving them is a mere matter of emptying them into glasses, and so the cultured wine-bibber frequently finds his sensibilities lacerated. I have myself had a Bidesheimer set before me in a red glass. I have seen a very fair Beaune served with the soup. I have drunk a thin, sad Moselle (it must have come from Luxemburg!) out of an old-fashioned champagne glass, with a hollow stem. I have witnesses that I was once offered Chateau Yquem with fish. Here there is plainly room for improvement. The gallant gobs of the Rum Fleet cannot come ashore to teach their customers and beneficiaries the commonest elements of human decency. Nor can their agents on land. These hearty lads have done all that can be asked of them when they have got the stuff over the dock and through the Methodist Papal Guard. If the wines that now come in so pleasantly are ever to be treated with the respect due their merit, then there must be a campaign of education by other agencies. I nominate no such agencies, for all that I can think of are dubious—for example, the newspapers, the pulpit, and the universities. Civilized drinking habits have never prevailed among journalists, nor do they prevail today at the universities. On the former subject consult Samuel G. Blythe’s “Cutting It Out’’; on the latter, any recent speech by a university dean. The pulpit is hopeless. More and more clergymen, I believe, ate resorting to the jug, but it will be a long while before they lift themselves from the jug to the hock-bottle.

Ill

So the job remains for pedagogues yet unorganized, and even undetected. Let them first address themselves, when they get into action, to the elements. Let them make it generally known, in a series of easy lessons, that red wines are not to be served with soup and fish, and that white wines had better not be brought on with huge roasts of bloody beef. Let them inculcate the great moral principle that (save for sound and sufficient reasons, too recondite for neophytes) the lighter wines are to be served first and the heavier afterward. Let them teach that drinking port after dinner, like drinking whiskey with it, is a practice confined to citizens of the Motherland, who, like Marines and Congressmen, judge alcoholic beverages by their kick, and by naught else. Let them, when they have made some progress, disseminate the news that, in the palmy days of the boozeart in America, a glass of sherry took the place of the current (but happily decaying) cocktail. Let them make it known that sweet liqueurs are distasteful to the refined male, and fill him with malaises for which no Lydia Pinkham offers a cure.

I outline only the studies of the first semester. The whole course may well run a lustrum, and still leave all save the most talented pupils two-thirds police sergeant. A lustrum? Rather say a century. For when one enters upon the subtleties of marks and vintages the business becomes as complicated as counterpoint or moral philosophy. But even on that high level something, at least, may be taught within the span of one life—for example, that St.-Julien means a Claret, even when the stuff in the bottle hails from Union Hill, N. J. Again, that an excess of any Italian red wine is apt to cause a powerful smarting of the pylorus. Yet again, that it is more civilized and satisfying to drink a bad wine with a good label than a bad wine with a bad label. Once more, that the safest of all drinks after 10 p.m. is malt liquor.

On the subject of malt liquor I could write at immense length. I am, in fact, a professor of it, and might very well fill the chair of it in the proposed College of Wines and Liquors. But pedagogy is foreign to my nature, and so I withdraw in advance, before the post is offered to me. There are as many subtleties in malt liquors as in wines. They are infinitely protean and various. In America, before the Blight, they were mainly bilge. They remain so to this day. But what the boys of the Rum Fleet have done with the still wines, they may do again with beers and ales. I look for better times. I expect, on some near tomorrow, to knock off a Lis’l of Pilsner Birgerbrau on American soil. Such is my faith—the substance of something hoped for, the evidence of something not yet seen.