Drink - Victoria Moore mulls it over
We escape from London. Filling the car with unsuitable clothing that would irk our parents (flippy skirts, woollen cardigans with fashionable but impractical three-quarter-length sleeves, and the shirt and tie demanded in the dining room of one country hotel), we head north. All day we drive further from the seasonless city. Outside our cosy capsule, there are actually trees doing the decent Keatsian thing: shedding leaves in glittering hues of russet and gold. By dusk, we are in an alien land. Hills rise up around us like silent sentries robed in impenetrable black. Behind them the last rays of the falling sun wash orange across the pallid sky. It is punishingly cold. Then it is dark.
We creep along narrow lanes surrounded by thorny trees. "Imagine," says my latest love fondly, "if I were to kick you out of the car here." I shiver, certain that if he did, dark forces would sweep me and my flippy skirt into the forest, never to be seen again. But my latest love tires of his feeble joke and, at last, we see the warm glow of a building on the skyline. Inside, there is the reassuring, hot smell of fire. And a well-stocked bar.
The Drunken Duck, between Ambleside and Hawkshead in the Lake District, brews its own beer (so good that at breakfast next morning, refugees from the south are still drooling over it). Best of all, there is mulled wine for our journey's end.
Apparently, mulled wine was first made during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), when the average person got through even more alcohol in a week than I do. Then, as now, a lot of wine was imported from France. But because it wasn't always up to scratch, it became common to add spices and peels to improve the flavour. A man called Colonel Negus is credited with being the first to appreciate the spicy, inebriating properties of mulling. His brew tended to use port or sherry as the alcohol base. To that, he added water, lemon, sugar, nutmeg and ambergris - a substance found in the intestines of the sperm whale. Considerably more adventurous than the orange peel, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, brandy and red wine mixture we now think of as being traditional.
In the Drunken Duck, I gratefully clasp my steaming glass, feeling like a weary traveller who has earned a sup of wine even though all I have done is sit in a car listening to Britney Spears and Robbie Williams on the radio all day.
The wine slips down my throat, syrupy and warm like a long kiss. It's pretty good. There is a sweet-sour taste - something like apple juice or honey - that I can't quite identify. "Do you know the recipe for this?" I ask the barman. "I can tell you exactly how it's made," he says proudly. "I did it myself." I grab a piece of paper and a pen in anticipation. "We used to boil red wine up in a pan with all the spices," he continues. "But now we get it in a bottle, already done. I'll show you." I am disappointed, though on reflection, I should have been able to tell. The sweet smoothness was a dead giveaway. Nevertheless, as a ready-made concoction it's fairly impressive. And the label on the bottle makes all the right noises, with pictures of fir trees, snow and huddling villages.
It's called Old Bavarian Gluckwein. When you think about it, as far as food and drink - and, indeed, anything else - go, it's about the only pleasurable thing the Germans have managed to produce.
I'm not sure whether it's the knowledge that it's poured directly from a bottle, rather than being lovingly tended to over a hot stove, but by my sixth glass the Old Bavarian is really beginning to cloy. It does not matter; it has already done its work. Long before last orders are called I am slumbering soundly in a vast, pillowy bed. And when we open our eyes the next morning, there are sheep outside the window, snow on the tops and the promise of more mulled wine at the end of the day.
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