This reissue of three slim Kingsley Amis books from the publisher Bloomsbury isn’t strictly speaking a great boon to wine drinkers. Its chief value, apart from terrifically sharp humor and compulsive readability, is how it affords a glimpse into the mind of someone who loves booze of any and every kind.
Wine, for Amis, is merely one more character in an alcoholic narrative full of mixed drinks, liquors, liqueurs and ales. In terms of the liveliness and scope of the book’s catalog of drinks, Everyday Drinking is almost Dickensian. It is instructive, if you are a wine-lover with romantic feelings about structure, viniculture and the like—I myself am especially fond of rhapsodizing how a wine’s color captures and toys with the light—to remember that there are many people who consider such things pretentious and time wasting. Amis knows wine and its rituals well, but they are certainly not something he writes about with any enthusiasm:
Hit your wine merchant across the mouth when, innocently trying to put you on to a good thing, or what he sees as one, he recommends you to “buy for laying down.”
Whatever the men in the know may say, a German wine label is a fearful thing to decipher.
Drink any wine you like with any dish…. The North of England couple I once read about who shared a half-bottle of crème de menthe (I hope it was a half-bottle) to go with their grilled turbot should be inspiration, if not a literal example, to us all.
It is good, wine enthusiast, to realize that this mindset isn’t rare.
The book is at its most fun in chapters on hangover, how to entertain guests while keeping the lion’s share of good booze for yourself (“Mean Sod’s Guide,” it’s called, with a separate entry for the wife, “Mean Slag’s Guide.”), and many recipes on awful-sounding punches and cocktails. Queen Victoria’s Tipple, anyone?
I would add that Amis, for all his humor and apparently prodigious drinking, is not someone who pretends to be a bon vivant, either: He is someone who knows what he is talking about, but I always feel he is speaking from an old leather club chair in a cloud of unfiltered cigarette smoke intermingled with some smoggy ecological mist of black and white and gray. I think he is fundamentally grim, in a post-empire, hungover sort of way. Maybe the hangover was literal. The book is highly recommended, anyway, as something to sip from, learn from and laugh at out loud.
