Of the many things I would not, as a young man, have predicted about my life at present, perhaps the most surprising is that I would spend dozens or perhaps hundreds of hours drinking gin in Spanish airports and train stations (I am writing this in Terminal Four of Barajas Airport in Madrid, where the cashier in duty free was kind enough to ask whether I needed — no, gracias — the customary sealed bag for my half-pint of Gordon’s). I didn’t start learning Spanish until three years after college, and I didn’t visit the country until I was almost 30. As a young man, I wasn’t scared of flying and had no need for such balsams to get through it. And finally, I used to think gin a repugnant swill old people pretended to like out of feigned sophistication.
To acquire a taste for gin in Spain is not as arbitrary as it seems. Spain’s only near rival in per capita gin consumption is its former colony, the Philippines — different surveys give different figures, but both take in well over a liter per person per year. The first Spanish gins were distilled in Menorca in the early 1700s, when the British took possession of the island in the War of the Spanish Succession, and Gin de Mahon, made from grape must and often mixed with lemonade, enjoys the same kind of protected designation as Champagne and Prosciutto di Parma. The dense wines of Toro or Ribera del Duero are hard to drink in the summer heat, which can easily exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in cities as far apart as Barcelona, Ourense, and Seville, and on afternoons when the sun is relentless, many Spaniards will prefer a gin and tonic, usually served in a balloon glass with ice cubes the size of golf balls. For 5 euros, or 8 euros if you go somewhere fancy, you get around 3 ounces of gin (or more if you want; waiters will just look at you and wait until you tell them to stop pouring) and an entire bottle of tonic.
Legend attributes the invention of gin’s ancestor — Jenever or Hollands gin, distilled malt wine flavored with juniper berries — to a Dutch alchemist, Franciscus Sylvius (11th-century documents from the Schola Medica Salernitana on the Tyrrhenian Sea also feature a recipe for juniper-infused liquor, but the Italians didn’t make the leap from distillates as presumptive medicine to distillates as an occasion for gaiety, so histories tend to overlook them). England, poorly suited to the cultivation of wine grapes, had long been a beer country. Soldiers warring in Northern Europe in the 1500s brought back a taste for liquor, and nobles and notables liked a glass of French brandy, but only with the rise of a Dutch monarch, William of Orange, did Britons begin as a body to enjoy what would one day become their trademark libation. William’s ascension had profited from the support of wealthy landowners who hoped to keep the price of grain high. The solution was twofold: a deregulation of distilling, which drove up domestic demand, and a ban on imported spirits from France, which was at war with England at the time.
The next 50 years would see a boom in gin production and consumption: At one point, London may have had as many as one distiller per 35 residents turning out several millions of gallons a year for a population still well under a million people. People bought shots from street vendors or out of primitive vending machines in which they spoke their order into a tube and slipped their payment into a coin slot. Workers, women, and children drank gin by the pint, and the poisonous goods of dodgy amateur distillers left more than a few customers blind or dead. This period, which came to be known as the Gin Craze, was perhaps the first moral panic: blame for rising crime was laid readily at gin’s feet. The great engraver William Hogarth gave visual form to growing disapproval with a print illustrating the horrors in Gin Lane, where revelers beat each other with stools, a man strolls about holding a bellows in one hand and an impaled child in another, a dwarf and his dog gnaw on the same bone, and a grinning slattern lets her child tumble down the stairs. In 1751, Henry Fielding composed a pamphlet, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, in which he inveighed against the deleterious effects of “intoxicating liquors, and particularly that poison called gin,” which he deemed “the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in this metropolis.” Two years earlier, Fielding had founded the Bow Street Runners, considered London’s first professional police force, to prosecute a crime wave he attributed chiefly to an excess of luxury among the “vulgar” classes.
Gin and imperialism went hand in hand, and when the great empires fell, gin remained behind. Bols, the world’s oldest, continuously operating branded distiller, consolidated its success as an exclusive supplier of “fine waters” to the board of directors for the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch took jenever to their colonies on three different continents, and British sailors carried rations of gin aboard their ships. In malarial zones, gin was added to medicinal quinine in an early version of the gin and tonic. The gimlet was born in the early 1800s, when British Navy men mixed gin with the lime cordial they drank to ward off scurvy (their demand for citrus would, incidentally, foster the protection rackets on Sicilian fruit-growing estates that evolved into the modern Cosa Nostra).
Much of gin’s fascinating history is procurable from Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s Gin, a recent installment in Bloomsbury’s generally wonderful and very stylish Object Lessons series, but few who have read another book on the subject will possess the required patience. Daunted, perhaps, by Lesley Jacobs Solmonson’s charming Gin: A Global History and Richard Barnett’s The Book of Gin, both of which she draws on, Humphrey has declined to make substantive additions to our understanding of the beverage or the culture surrounding it, preferring to paste together tidbits from her sources with chatty asides about herself. The approach is not always devoid of appeal: The story of the cinema owner who gave her paper cups of Gibley’s and grapefruit and let her shoot his guns behind the screen is a good one, at least until she ruins it with a stuffy note of retrospective disapproval.
But most often, navigating past her autobiographical incursions feels like digging through too much bubble wrap and packing peanuts to try and find the thing you actually ordered. Humphrey is addicted to the punchy one-sentence paragraph (“Think about that,” “Enter gin,” “Here is how it went down”). She has a bad habit of appending the idle phrase “I learned” to information it is obvious she wasn’t born with. She reaches readily for cliches such as the “rabbit hole” and the “chicken-and-egg scenario,” and her facts are occasionally wrong: “London Dry Gin relies on juniper, and juniper only, for its flavor” is a statement applicable to none of the most famous brands made in that style. Her assertion that Samuel Pepys, whose diary records drinking “strong water made of juniper,” was likely too “respectable” to have drunk spirits for pleasure will bemuse anyone who’s read his many accounts of drinking, hangovers, and inebriated carousal. These kinds of slip-ups, or her perplexing claim of a special place for gin in rap music, speak of a person not well acquainted with her subject and of a book written on a lark, or opportunistically, rather than from any real passion.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
