Drink (66 page)

Similar views toward wine and intoxication prevailed in Italy, where levels of consumption likewise rose in the 1950s and continued to do so for the following decade. However, the demographics of the country changed markedly over the same period as Italians emigrated from rural areas into cities, resulting in changes in drinking habits. Whereas in rural Italy wine had been a type of food, a part of every meal, and served as such, albeit in diluted form, to children as well as adults, in the fast-growing cities eating and drinking came to be perceived of as separate acts. Moreover, the new metropolitans were nakedly materialist and took their cultural inspiration from the United States, which further weakened the customary link between the bottle and the dining table.

An unflattering picture of the changing values of the period is provided in the film
La Dolce Vita
(1960), which represents the Romans of its age as obsessed with celebrity, cars, and sensation. The film also reflects unfavorably on shifting attitudes toward alcohol. Whereas, traditionally, Italians had frowned on public displays of drunkenness, this ugly phenomenon is shown to be gaining acceptance in contemporary society, principally as a result of American influences. The film chronicles the exploits of Marcello, a journalist, as he chases scoops and celebrities through the streets of Rome and the neighboring countryside. In early scenes, the only overt drunks are American visitors who show no shame in their condition, indeed advocate it as an acceptable state. Toward the end of the film Marcello has acquired the same habit, and becomes aggressive and irrational when under the influence.

La Dolce Vita
also illustrates the penetration of foreign drinks in Roman society. Its fashionable characters drink vodka, gin fizzes, and named brands of scotch whisky. In contrast, the unfashionable, such as Marcello’s father, a traveling salesman, stick to traditional stimulants such as champagne when they want to celebrate. There are, finally, hints of the revival in Italian wines that occurred in the decade following the release of the film. In response to EEC legislation, a quality regime was introduced—the
Denominazione d’Origine Controllata
(Denomination of Controlled Origin or DOC), loosely based on the French AOC model, which defined regions, grapes, and production methods for wines such as Barolo and Barbaresco from Piedmont, and Brunello di Montalcino from Tuscany. Although the DOC regime was slow to be implemented—indeed, has yet to be applied to the entire country—Italian production increased, quality improved, and Italians were prepared to pay more for good wines from their own soil.

The French-inspired concept that only wine from a specific geographical area made in accordance with local practice might be allowed to call itself, say, champagne, while a matter of law in France and the EEC, was something of a novelty beyond the country itself and its new European partners. It was tested in the British courts in 1958, when the French government brought a criminal suit against a British importer of fizzy wine from Spain which he sold under the label of “Spanish Champagne.” The suit failed, but the following year a civil action against the same wine merchant succeeded, which established an important precedent; namely that a foreign country might recognize and protect, as if it were a commercial brand, the intellectual property created by the AOC system or one similar. Only champagne made in Champagne in accordance with French regulation might be sold as such. The decision caused heated debate in the British press. Some foresaw a world where protectionism reigned and even basic foodstuffs such as walnuts might be patented, while others considered the ruling an affront to the poor.

Great Britain took a long time to recover from World War II. Food rationing persisted until 1952, and beer output fell steadily between 1945 and 1951. Although its potency rose, so did its price, and the availability of potable water at home was no consolation. In addition to constraints upon supply, which meant that that pubs frequently ran dry of beer, restrictive opening times remained in force so that even if a pub had suds, its customers were forced to squeeze their drinking into narrow slots. The writer George Orwell considered the British drinking experience to be unpleasant enough to dissuade tourists, whose presence, it had been hoped, would speed up reconstruction, from visiting the country: “Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away. Why should people who are used to paying sixpence for a bottle of wine visit a country where a pint of beer costs a shilling? But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-five past.” As an incentive to fight this evil, Orwell offered a literary picture of his ideal pub, the Moon Under Water, a sort of drinker’s Eden, where English beer lovers of every caste might relax in unison with their spouses and offspring.

The miseries endured by postwar English beer drinkers were slight in comparison to the torments suffered by Scottish whisky lovers. Most production was diverted to the export market to earn foreign currency for reconstruction, and whisky for home consumption was rationed until 1960. The anguish that afflicted scotch aficionados deprived of their daily drams was caricatured in the movie
Whisky Galore!
(1949). Set on a small island in the Hebrides during the Second World War, and based on a true incident,
Whisky Galore!
depicts the attempts of whisky-starved islanders to salvage the cargo of a ship that has run aground with fifty thousand cases of the water of life on board and which is protected by the British home guard. The movie provides an affectionate view of drinking, indeed proposes that life without whisky is not worth living. “Some men are born a couple of drams short of par,” opines the local doctor of the tight little island, as he makes up the natural shortfall with a glass of scotch.

As the economic climate improved in the late 1950s, British drinking underwent a revival. Beer consumption returned to prewar levels in the middle of the decade, and home consumption of whisky did the same in 1961. The fifties also witnessed the appearance of a novelty in the British beer market—lager. This cold, fizzy substance, the antithesis of bitter, had first been brewed in Britain on a commercial scale in 1949. The market leader, Skol, was targeted at younger drinkers who were thought to find the powerful taste of bitter off-putting. Despite having a market share of only 1 percent in 1960, lager was heavily promoted, attracting 19 percent of all the advertising spent on beer in the same year. Since lager had no traditional associations in the mind of the British drinker, these had to be invented. Its comparative lack of flavor was turned to its advantage. Ads focused on its refreshing qualities rather than its taste and depicted it as perfectly suited to the exciting new era of television and rock ’n’ roll that Britain, belatedly, had joined.

Notwithstanding the recovery in consumption, the British were still drinking less than a third of the amount of booze on a per capita basis as their counterparts in France—the equivalent of a mere seven and a half liters of pure alcohol per annum against twenty-five. Despite such comparative abstinence, they nonetheless perceived of themselves as being heavy drinkers, a perception that was reflected in the plays, fiction, and films of the period. The movie
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960), for instance, which chronicles the life of a young factory worker in Britain in the fifties, presents alcohol as an anesthetic against the pain and boredom of a futile existence. Drunkenness allows its hero a temporary refuge in oblivion, and the condition is his principal aim when drinking. Such a mentality was the polar opposite of that which prevailed in France, where people drank for taste first and stimulation second.

A kinder picture of British tippling was presented in
Coronation Street,
the longest-running soap opera on British television, first broadcast in December 1960. The show is set in a terrace of houses in a northern town and features a neighborhood pub, the Rover’s Return, where its characters socialize en masse. In addition to drinking and gossiping they play darts and other traditional pub games. The Rover’s Return serves them as a home away from home—a kind of community center very much in the style of the village alehouse. On the rare occasions when one of its clientele has one too many, a motive, other than the mere desire to see double, is provided. People drink to compensate for disappointment, or to celebrate success, and alcohol, by offering consolation, or enhancing merriment, is presented as serving a useful role in society.

While overall consumption patterns in Great Britain in the 1950s were closer to those portrayed in
Coronation Street
than
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
there were exceptions, notably in Soho, London, where the rising stars of literature and painting met to drink deep. The epicenter of their boozing was the Colony Room, run by the formidable Muriel Belcher, who encouraged her customers to be as rude to each other as possible when in their cups, and who led by example. The Colony’s clientele included the painter Francis Bacon, who was provided with free drinks in return for introducing new customers. Among the other heavy-drinking artists he brought to the club were Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud, and Patrick Caulfield. Indeed, painters, whether figurative or abstract, seem to have taken to the bottle with the same abandon as writers during the middle decades of the twentieth century: The consumption of the principal British artists of the period was matched and perhaps exceeded by America’s Abstract Impressionists—Rothko, Pollock, and De Kooning were all alcoholics.

The binge drinking practiced in Soho was also a feature of Britain’s institutions of higher learning, where the competitive forms of consumption that had been typical of the eighteenth century were revived and improved. Although the average Briton may have been sober compared to his or her continental counterpart, British students drank in defiance of the trend. Their teachers, too, were fond of their sauce, as is illustrated in the first British campus novel—
Lucky Jim,
by Kingsley Amis. Set in a red brick university at the turn of the 1950s, the novel follows the fortunes of Jim Dixon, a young lecturer who, in contrast to the older members of his faculty, prefers pop songs to English classical music and who would rather spend time drinking pints in a pub than sipping sherry in a drawing room. The novel employs inebriation both as a deus ex machina to manage the plot and as a device to permit Jim to speak his mind. It also features one of the most memorable descriptions of a hangover in literature, as Jim awakes to find he has set his bed on fire: “Not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”

Campus drinking rituals, especially at Oxford and Cambridge, were matters of fascination to foreign visitors. An Australian studying at University College, Oxford, for instance, recorded his bemusement when ordered to drink a “sconce” of two and a half pints of beer as a penalty for appearing at dinner without a gown. He did so, in the then-world record time of eleven seconds. Bob Hawke, the drinker in question, prime minister of Australia between 1983 and 1992, later acknowledged that “this feat was to endear me to some of my fellow Australians more than anything else I ever achieved.”

Hawke had honed his speed-drinking skills as an undergraduate in his native Australia, which, at the close of World War II, had one of the most restrictive liquor licensing regimes in the world. Public houses throughout the nation closed their doors at 6:00 P.M. Rather, however, than persuading Australians to drink less, it caused them to drink faster, resulting in the notorious “six o’clock swill,” when workers would try to fit a full evening’s drinking into the hour between finishing work and closing time. The public bars of Australian hotels were designed to accommodate rapid, perpendicular drinking. Few had any furniture or interior fixtures at all, beyond a shelf around the wall where customers might rest their glasses in between drafts. Beer was dispensed from a device resembling a gasoline pump. The floors and the walls were tiled so that they might be hosed down after each session. Perpendicular speed drinking led to horizontal drinkers: “When the pubs closed, the streets filled with wild cries and the gutters ran with chunder.”
⁶⁷
This “unedifying spectacle” and an epidemic of automobile accidents involving drunks, led to the appointment of a royal commission, which reported in 1954 that “there are evils associated with six o’clock closing which ought not to be tolerated in a civilized community.” New South Wales civilized its licensing laws in 1956, but Victoria and South Australia did not follow suit until 1966 and 1967 respectively.

Despite the persistence of restrictive laws in much of the country, Australian per capita beer consumption rose steadily, if not spectacularly, throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Whereas it had been a mere twelve gallons per person per annum immediately prior to World War II, by 1953 it had risen to more than twenty and, by the mid ’60s, was nudging thirty gallons. While beer was considered the national beverage, wine consumption was also on the up over the same period. This increase resulted in part from changing demographics: In the decade following the war more than a million continental European immigrants arrived in Australia, many of whom came from wine-drinking cultures. Their presence revitalized Australian wine production. Prior to 1957, Australia produced more fortified wine than table wine. The switch from empire standards such as Australian port and sherry to lighter styles was driven by demand from non-Anglo-Saxon Australians, and by an increase in the number of Australian women who drank. The latter had been notable by their absence in the ritual of the six o’clock swill, except behind the bar; indeed, midcentury Australian drinking was by and large an all-male ritual, in which mates took turns to “shout” each other rounds of beer before crawling home. However, a fashion for
pearl
or
perle
wines in the 1950 converted many Australian women to the pleasures of the grape. These were produced using temperature- and pressure-controlled fermentation, resulting in a light, naturally effervescent drink reminiscent of weak champagne. The brand leader was Barossa Pearl, introduced by Gramps in 1957. Barossa Pearl was drinkable rather than beautiful—“a sort of feminine substitute for beer,” according to an observer of the period.