The marketing value of the new Bond film has boosted sales of a little-known French vermouth, but Adam Edwards is feeling bitter
January is when I give my liver a bit of R&R... well, some of early January anyway. For the rest of the year, my personal detox clinic successfully copes with an extensive range of UK beers and continental lagers, wines from the Old and New Worlds, several crates of Scotland's preferred spirit and a burst of summer cocktails and Christmas stickies.
Then, in January, I give it a rest. And during this time of purgatory I have discovered that the only tolerable alternative to a foaming pint of ale is soda with ice, flavoured and coloured by a drop or two of Angostura bitters. It is one of the few soft drinks that one can sip all night with pleasure. However in ordering this austere refreshment, it is perfectly obvious that the penchant for lacing drinks with the West Indian bitters has evaporated in this country. The stubby bottle with its ill-fitting and unreadable label and screw-on yellow plastic cap, once synonymous with snifters, sharpeners and saloon bar majors, is gathering dust in the back of most bars, its main purpose in life as the pink in a pink gin now redundant.
I believe that the author Ian Fleming is to blame for this situation. The creator of James Bond oddly, in my view, decided on an American cocktail as the chosen drink for his raffish spy. Why, I wonder, didn't he get 007, who was, after all, a former British naval officer, to drink the navy's equivalent of a dry martini, a pink gin?
It would have been just as cool for Bond to have asked for a splash of bitters to be spun around a glass before pouring in a slug of cold juniper juice rather than calling for the roughing up of a jigger of vermouth in a shaker of potato alcohol. It would have been a case of swirled and shaken rather than shaken and not stirred.
The consequences of Bond's choice of cocktail can still be felt. Angostura was once a symbol of empire, the colour perfectly complementing the pink that detailed Britain's colonies and protectorates in all atlases and on all globes. A pink world fictionally defended by Commander Bond.
But now the consummate Englishman's tipple, the drink that Bond eschewed, is forgotten. Its name is no more than a nostalgic reminder of bygone Brylcreem days.
Meanwhile, this winter it has been reported that Daniel Craig's back-to-basics James Bond in Casino Royale has brought a bonanza to Lillet, a small French drinks firm whose apéritif was an integral part of 007's dry martini. The Lillet Company, in the village of Podensac near Bordeaux, has been deluged with queries and orders for its orange vermouth since Craig mentioned the original recipe in the new film of Fleming's 1953 book.
That marketing bonanza could have been Angostura's. Sadly, because Britain's most famous fictional male was made to drink a cocktail popularised by American speakeasies, an obscure foreign vermouth is now more recognized than the mixer that once personified the stiff upper lip. And instead of bitters still celebrating the sun going over the yardarm, it now helps detox those who have gone over the top.
An oasis for the country pub
A recent press release by Camra has, with all its usual doom and gloom, warned of the death of the English country pub. Our rural pubs are vanishing at the rate of 20 a month, it says, while draught beer sales are dropping (by 6% so far in 2006). The cigarette ban beginning to come into force next year will make matters even worse. "Can the old-fashioned isolated rural local survive?" the article asks.
The answer is "yes", if the Birdsville Hotel in the Australian outback is any sort of example. It is probably the world's remotest pub. It was built in 1884 and is located in far western Queensland, on the fringe of the Simpson Desert, in an area the size of France known as the "dead heart" of the outback. Its two nearest cities, Brisbane and Adelaide, are each 1,000 miles away.
The landlady, Jo Fort, mine host for the last 27 years, has now had her fill of the isolation (Birdsville has a population of less than 100 hardy souls) not to mention the heat (temperatures can reach 50°C) and difficulties with getting stock (it is on the dirt road to nowhere).
Yet, amazingly, she is asking over A$10m (£4m) for the simple, stone, single-storey building with whitewashed verandas.
The reason for the exorbitant price is that on any given night there are 300-400 adventure tourists in the pub who have got there in 4x4s, carrying their own water, fuel, supplies and spare parts in case of an emergency in the desert. And when they arrive there is only one thing that satisfies them - cold beer, and lots of it.
It is, Camra and other pessimists please note, sometimes just a question of getting the business angle right.
Welsh rare writ
This spring, pubs in Wales will be forced to carry bilingual "no smoking" signs that state "it is unlawful to smoke in these premises". Unfortunately the Welsh word for premises (fangre) is rarely used and not understood by most Welsh speakers. This has not, however, stopped the Welsh Assembly from introducing it.
If my memory serves me right a similar situation occurred many years ago when the law first demanded Welsh as well as English on road signs in Wales. Unfortunately the Welsh language didn't have a word for toilet or rather it had one for an outside toilet ("ty bach") but not for an inside loo. The result was the creation of a new word. The bilingual signs now carry both the word "toilet" and its Welsh translation "toiledau". One has to have a heart of Welsh slate not to laugh.