How Champagne Got Its Fizz On
The past lives of some celebrated beverages, as distilled from Drink.
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BEER
Hops + Ale = “Noxious Foreign Concoction”
Although beer had been around since ancient Egypt, ale-crazy Elizabethans first dismissed the beverage (essentially just ale infused with hops) as a newfangled drink for foreigners that “doth make a man fat.” Shakespeare’s heroes drink ale; his villains drink beer.
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GIN
Madame Geneva: Strip-Me-Naked!
Gin may have been perfected in seventeenth-century Holland, but it exploded in 1720s London, where a superabundance of cheap home-brewed varieties led to 25 years of addiction (the average city resident drank a pint a week), crime, and mob killings that some feared would end only in apocalypse.
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CHAMPAGNE
Sacrebleu! Les Bulles!
Real French Champagne was sweet but still. When the English imported it to their warm cellars in the 1660s, it went through a second fermentation and turned bubbly—sacrilege to the French, but soon de rigueur overseas.
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(Photo: Superstock)
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ABSINTHE
The Green Fairy
Wormwood was thought to heal illnesses and help witches fly; in 1792 it was harnessed to make a potent green liquor that became a controversial nineteenth-century craze in Paris. Rimbaud, a devotee, liked to put sulfuric acid in other people’s beer.
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COCKTAILS
Sticky solution
Popularized in twenties American speakeasies, where the juices, bitters, and sugar covered up bad-quality Prohibition-era alcohol, the cocktail quickly became a dinner-party staple. H. L. Mencken called the dry martini “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.”
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