Gin and (Fever-Tree) Tonic
Blind Muscat has a lengthy and colorful medical history, including multiple surgeries and a number of obscure, hard-to-pronounce immune system disorders. But he’s never had malaria, and he owes it entirely to his love for gin and tonics.
Many converts to the joys of wine develop an aversion to, even a contempt for distilled spirits, or at least those not made from grapes. However much elegant, connoisseur-ish prose such prejudices are wrapped in, they remain juvenile. Grown-ups drink spirits, too, in the right time and place. And on a hot summer day on your back porch, a good, icy gin and tonic is worth a tankerful of Pinot Grigio.
Given my advanced age, it’s not surprising that I am a gin guy, not a vodka drinker. Legally defined as a neutral, characterless beverage, vodka is more expensive than EverClear and not nearly as potent. The so-called Vodka Martini started our culture on the slippery road to perdition, paved these days with Chocolatinis and the rest of the faux concoctions that are “Martinis” only in the sense that they are served in the same kind of cocktail glass real Martinis grace. Make way for the horse whizz Martini.
Gin, properly made, sports a bounty of botanical flavorings, and marries most happily with mixers that do the same—starting with vermouth, in an actual Martini, but also including the gin-Campari-sweet vermouth Negroni and the humble gin and tonic water. Gin and tonic may not have the depth of the other classics, but it does combine crystalline effervescence with amazing flavor complexity.
And, of course, it prevents malaria. (Well, at least the tonic water does.) The story of quinine—the ingredient that makes tonic water a tonic—is the stuff of several books. The tangled tale goes something like this: Spanish conquistadores discovered that the bark of a particular tree helped quell trembling fevers among the indigenous people of Latin America; the eminent taxonomist Linnaeus named the tree cinchona in 1742, a century after the Countess of Chinchon, wife of a Spanish viceroy in Peru, had been cured by the “fever tree”; two French scientists isolated the active ingredient, quinine, in 1817, naming it after the native Quecha word for the bark, quina; the Brits turned it into a tonic, along with sugar and water, in 1825 to ward off malaria during their military exploits in India. (and we all know how well that worked out.)
By somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, tonic water had become identified overwhelmingly with the Schweppes brand. It’s okay, but it’s nothing special, and a touch sweet. The latest wrinkle—important only for the history of gin and tonic drinking, not the history of quinine and malaria—is a new contender in the market, Fever-Tree Indian Tonic Water, which is spectacularly tasty. Fever-Tree tonic is made from natural ingredients and flavorings; it gets quinine from a stand of trees planted by Brits in Rwanda a century and a half ago, and its botanical flavorings include things like “hand cold pressed orange oil from Tanzania,” and on and on. Whatever: it makes your gin and tonic sing like never before.
If it’s good enough for El Bulli, it’s good enough for Blind Muscat.
Disclosure: I was furnished a sample bottle by the Fever-Tree PR people, which I split three ways with friends into mini-gin and tonics. Full Disclosure: I subsequently went out and bought a ton of the stuff on my own dime.
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