Mar 29, 2013 Amy Stewart
Algonquin
ISBN 978-1616200466
381 pages
$19.95
Reviewed by Rick Nichols
My wife and I biked home from work one humid spring evening to find an icy Mason jar sweating by the doormat. It was a gift from our neighbor, the widow of a Swedenborgian minister, an intrepid gardener known for her climbing roses. The jar was stuffed with a tangle of greens - a frilly ground cover she snipped each late April and early May called sweet woodruff. It gave off the warm scent of cardamom or maybe shavings of cedar. And steeped in white jug wine with sliced strawberries, it was the signature of the fragrant, spring-time chiller that Germans call maiwein, or May wine.
We'd had it before. But this time around, hot and parched from our ride, we guzzled it down on the porch, rocking on the swing, until the fireflies came out. And until, well, our heads were spinning. We barely made it in the door. Was there something different in the wine this time? we asked our neighbor after we'd sobered up. She looked puzzled, then brightened: "Oh, I added a cup of vodka. For pep!"
Oy, we'd imbibed far more than our minimum daily requirement of alcoholized fruits and grains and leaves. But what did we know? In the spirit world - and in the wine, craft beer and brave, new, artisan cocktail worlds, for that matter - what you see is not always quite what you think you're getting. Is there angostora bark in Angostora Bitters? Maybe, maybe not. (A trademark fight led to obscure labeling.) Why does Maker's Mark bourbon seem gentler? It adds wheat, instead of the usual rye, to its mix, removing rye's spicy bite. Does innocent-looking sweet woodruff have toxic levels of coumarin? At times, yes. But not if it's picked in the early spring.
In fact, most of us don't have a clue about the botanical mysteries that lurk - luxuriate? - in our bottles of Bluecoat gin and bowls of punch, in the rattling shakers and sparkling stemware we engage to sand the rough edges off.
But there are, indeed, back stories behind every sip, starring the exotic and prosaic plants that perfume our booze, give rise to our vodka - tap-lines of maple sap are run straight into one small-batch distillery in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom - and turn water (at Dogfish Head's brewery in Milton, Del.) into a cacao-inflected beer. Those curious stories and asides are the stuff of nature-writer Amy Stewart's latest amble through the garden, "The Drunken Botanist."
Spoiler alert: No actual botanists get drunk in these pages. In fact, they come off as heroic stiffs, a diligent, self-sacrificing lot, one of them (David Douglas of fir tree fame) killed on a volcano in Hawaii, another (USDA plant explorer Frank Meyer, who brought the sweet Meyer lemon back from China) swept to his death down the Yangtze River in 1918. And most poignant of all, the academician Nikolai Vavilov, a tireless, globe-trotting geneticist who ran afoul of Stalin's pseudo-science and was tossed into a Soviet jail where he died in 1943 after a career trying to boost Russia's famously erratic crop yields. Stewart dedicates one of her featured cocktail recipes to him, the Vavilov Affair, a twist on the Old Fashioned with equal parts applejack and bourbon.
She is something of a Queen of the Jungle these days, with three New York Times best-sellers under her belt: "Wicked Bugs," "Wicked Plants," and "Flower Confidential." But like ultra-hoppy beer, this latest effort may tickle the initiated while leaving newcomers wondering on occasion if there can be too much of a good thing.
"The Drunken Botanist" is a strange brew - part Ripley's Believe it or Not, part compendium on the order of "Schott's Original Miscellany," and part botanical garden tour, albeit with a curated cocktail party at the end. It is meant, one supposes, as a companionable reference and whimsical recitation of historical-botanical trivia, with a little tart debunking. Tequila? Like a fine Scotch, the good stuff requires only a splash of water, she suggests. No lime and salt, which originated as cover-ups for rough flavors in low-end stuff.
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