So I cleverly turned one of the trickier (for me) Nonfiction Reader Challenge categories – gardening – into reading a book about gin! Yay me!

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart explores, in great detail, the plants that create the ‘world’s greatest drinks’.

The book came about after a visit to a liquor store (in Australia, we call it a bottle shop, or bottle-o) with a fellow botanist –

…we stood in the doorway for a minute and looked around us. There wasn’t a bottle in the store that we couldn’t assign a genus and species … Suddenly we weren’t in a liquor store anymore. We were in a fantastical greenhouse, the world’s most exotic botanical garden…

That’s a fun party trick!

The book is broken into sections, beginning with ‘the classics’ such as barley, rice, wheat, juniper – and moving to the more obscure – aloe, sassafras, galangal, quandong – and so on (over 150 plants, flowers, trees, fruits, and a few fungi are included). Stewart examines the botanical history of each plant, it’s properties, and the chemistry of turning it into whatever finds its way into our wines, beers, liqueurs, and other tipples.

It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same on that sustains life on the planet.

The historical and cultural element provides the broad appeal of this book –

The oldest domesticated living organism is not a horse or a chicken, nor is it corn or wheat. It is a wild single-celled, asexual creature capable of preseving food, making bread rise, and fermenting drinks. It is yeast.

There are lots of fascinating stories included. For example, Stewart tells of how a tiny American pest (an aphid, phylloxera) near destroyed the French wine industry in the nineteenth century. American president, Jefferson, gifted France some native American vines. Little did anyone know, they carried phylloxera, and European vines had no resistance to the pest. By the time the pest was understood, France’s wine industry was almost obliterated, however, salvation came from the plant that caused the problem in the first place – the resilient American grapevine. Grafting brought the industry back. In the meantime –

Because wine was in short supply during the outbreak, absinthe became the drink of choice in cafes.

However, French winemakers soon advocated for a prohibition that would ban absinthe but protect wine, stating wine was a ‘moral and healthy drink’, while absinthe made drinkers ‘crazy’ (this was actually due to the extremely high alcohol content, not because the plant that it’s made from, wormwood, is toxic).

Interesting side-note: some people still seek out ‘pre-phylloxera wine’, made from small pockets of European vines that managed to survive on their own roots. Pre-phylloxera wines are available in Chile because Spanish missionaries brought the grapes there, but the phylloxera never arrived.

The fine detail – for example what allows you to name something ‘tequila’ or ‘brandy’ or ‘bitters’, or the botanical nitty-gritty of particular plants was interesting to me, however some readers might find it a bit too much –

The agave is better known for what it is not than for what it is. Some people think it is a kind of cactus, in fact, it is a member of the botanical order of Asparagales, making it more similar to asparagus and a few other unlikely relatives…

On balance, there’s probably more in this book that falls into the technical/ chemical/ botanical category, rather than cultural/ social/ historical, and for that reason, it was slow in parts. However, there were plenty of tidbits to reward my perseverance –

In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that ‘mezcal is described as tasting like a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity. Tequila is even worse, and is said to incite murder, riot and revolution.’

3/5

At one of her book launches, Stewart served a Mamani Gin & Tonic (a tribute to a Bolivian cascarillero (bark and seed hunter), Manuel Incra Mamani, ‘…the man who lost everything to bring quinine to the rest of the world…’. Mamani was arrested, imprisoned and beaten on a seed-collecting trip in 1871. He refused to identify his employer (likely because he was providing seeds to foreigners). He subsequently died of his injuries.