This isn’t a collection of books about drunkenness or alcoholism, though both feature. Rather, it is a celebration of those who write well about alcoholic drinks. I write about alcohol for a living. My latest book, The Home Bar, is a guide to setting up your domestic refreshments but it is also about booze history and culture. With drink, and especially wine, it’s easy to write in a technical way and leave out what makes alcohol interesting for most people: its intoxicating properties. Most drink-soaked fiction – by Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and others – ignores the nerdy stuff. It is the intersection between connoisseurship and drunkenness that interests me.
I return to the following books again and again for inspiration and amusement. I am sure readers will vehemently disagree with some of my omissions.
1. A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin
Drink is the lubricant of many crime novels. I could have included work by Chandler or Simenon, but instead I’ve chosen one that revolves around wine. A Long Finish focuses on a grudge between two families of vignerons in Piedmont, and it includes great descriptions of the uncompromising wines of Barbaresco. Wine also represents the faultlines in Italian society; the conflict between the families stems from in which side each family took during the second world war. Nobody writes about Italy’s dark underbelly better than Dibdin, and his detective, Aurelio Zen, enjoys the long alcoholic soak as much as Philip Marlowe or Maigret.
2. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead is neither Waugh’s best book (I favour the Sword of Honour trilogy), nor his funniest (Scoop or The Loved One), but it is the best from a booze point of view. The scenes of drunkenness between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder include some of the funniest parodies of wine talk: “a little, shy wine like a gazelle”. There’s also the excellent cognac-off between Rex Mottram and Ryder, which is a masterclass in razor-sharp snobbery.
3. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
No apologies for including such an obvious choice. So useful have the Bond novels been to drink writers and the drinks industry that there should be statues of James Bond (preferably as Roger Moore in a safari suit) outside Diageo HQ and Bollinger. I’ve picked Casino Royale as it has given us a cocktail, the Vesper martini: made with “three measures of Gordon’s gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold.” It is especially good made with a decent Polish potato vodka.
4. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Just as Bond is associated with the dry martini, so Hemingway is with the daiquiri. I’ve chosen A Farewell to Arms for its sheer variety of alcoholic beverages. Though it is set during the first world war, there’s an optimism about all the cheery Italian drinks it mentions: Campari, Cinzano, marsala – the book could have been funded by the vermouth marketing board. There’s also some decidedly Bond-esque connoisseurship: “The best kummel comes in those bear-shaped bottles. It comes from Russia.”
5. A Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
Lanchester’s debut novel is a cookbook-diary of Englishman Tarquin Winot, whose relatives and acquaintances die with alarming frequency. A love letter to the ultimate gastronomic civilisation – France – this book contains recipes, mouth-watering descriptions of meals and plenty about booze – including the perfect martini (seven parts Beefeater gin to one Noilly Prat) and an unbeatable description of one of my favourite reds, Chinon, that is so spot on you can almost taste it: “both playful and fruity in some moods, darker and even a touch forbidding in others…”
6. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by AJ Liebling
Published in 1959, this is an account of Liebling’s time in Paris in the 20s. Like Lanchester’s novel, it is a hymn to the pleasures of French gastronomy. Indeed, Liebling paid a heavy debt to pleasure in the form of gout so severe he could barely walk. There are paeans to France’s liquid treasures: burgundy, beaujolais, cognac, and, most memorably, to the greatest rosé of all, tavel from southern Rhône: “The taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalising suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.”
7. I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton
This book is ostensibly about wine and philosophy, but Scruton also writes movingly about his relationship with his father, and his political and spiritual awakening in Paris in 1968. Scruton isn’t interested in grape varieties and types of barrel; instead he looks at wine’s cultural and religious roots, and acknowledges its transformative power.
8. The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto by Bernard DeVoto
The Pulitzer-winning historian wrote this mock heroic about the joys of the cocktail hour in 1948. He grasped that the job of a drink writer is not necessarily to be right, but to take a strong stance on unimportant things. DeVoto forbade all cocktails except the martini (his perfect ratio is 3.7 parts gin to one part vermouth) and the old fashioned. The Hour is enormously fun and endlessly quotable: “You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss in there.” Just don’t treat it as a guide to making cocktails.
9. Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis
This collection of Amis’s writings about drinks is a mixed bag. He isn’t very interested in wine but when it comes to spirits, he’s your man. Amis even has his own cocktail, The Lucky Jim: 12 parts vodka, one part Martini Rosso, two parts lemon juice. The best chapter is the one on “boozemanship”, which is “the art or science of coming ahead in drinking matters”. It is Amis’s very funny take on gamesmanship, and includes the perfect way to deal with a wine bore.
10. Adventures on the Wine Route by Kermit Lynch
Kermit Lynch has a lesson for all writers on drink: “Wine is, above all, pleasure. Those who would make it ponderous make it dull.” The 1988 book is powered by Lynch’s anger at producers cutting corners and abandoning time-honoured methods to make their wine more modern. It’s also very funny – take his writing about blind tasting: “When a woman chooses a hat, she does not put it on a goat’s head to judge it; she puts it on her own.” Difficult to argue with that.
• The Home Bar: A Guide to Designing, Equipping and Stocking Your Own Bar by Henry Jeffreys is published by Jacqui Small, priced £25. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £22, including free UK p&p.
