The modern concerns between alcohol and health are nothing new, although it’s not always that people thought about it in the negative. There’s no denying its versatility, for alcohol is our oldest medicine. Wine was all physician Galen had at his disposal in second-century Pergamon to bathe deep wounds inflicted by lions upon the gladiators in his care. He claimed not to have lost a single one. Several spirits were created especially by the medical profession and liqueurs were actually invented centuries ago. Their original role was purely medicinal – as an aid to digestion, as a dressing for cuts and wounds and as a rather hopeful cure for the Bubonic Plague. One liqueur in particular was even developed to instil its drinker with eternal life. The Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, used wine in nearly every one of his recorded remedies. Interestingly, he would recommend a specific wine to combat a particular ailment. Were he alive today it is interesting to watch whether a Margaret River, Hunter Valley, Barossa or a McLaren Vale dry red would be chosen to cool fevers, or to act as a diuretic, an antiseptic or to help convalescence, all Hippocratic uses of wine. But if the patient suffered from an “overpowering heaviness of the head, or if the brain is affected, there must be a total abstinence from wine”, he recommended. Patently sensible chap. Dr Franciscus de la Boe (who is known as Dr Sylvius) was the inventor of gin. A professor of medecine at the Dutch University of Leiden in the eighteenth century, Dr Sylvius intended it to perform as a blood cleaner for sale in apothecaries rather than in taverns. However the good professor’s smooth, scented and inexpensive nostrum soon not only cleansed the blood of countless native Hollanders, but also warmed the minds and bodies of English soldiers then campaigning in the Lowlands. Interested no doubt in expanding its medicinal benefit, English monarch William III of Orange (actually a Dutchman) took the formula to his cold and foggy isle, whereafter a mass-heating of nationwide proportions has continued to take place. Gin is a distilled, pure grain spirit with the flavour of juniper berries, herbs and spices, although each maker jealously guards their own precise formula. The fundamental flavourings likely to be contained in gin are coriander, cardamon, angelica, orris root, dried lemon and orange peel. Some devotees claim it improves with age, but it is meant to be ready to drink straight after bottling. The original liqueurs were made about a thousand years ago by adding sweet, scented syrups to crude ancient distilled spirits, thereby enhancing their flavour and supposedly improving the health of those prepared to drink them. The descendants of these original liqueurs survive today. Hardly crude and uncivilised at all, Benedictine is one of the great classical liqueurs. It was invented around 1510 at the Benedictine monastery in Fecamp, France, by Dom Bernardo Vincelli, to fortify and restore weary and beleaguered fellow-monks. Unfortunately the monastery was destroyed in the French Revolution, the Order dispersed, and the production of the strong elixir was brought to a halt. Somehow the original formula came into the hands of one M. Alexandre Le Grand some seventy years later. He established the present secular concern which continues to produce the liqueur until this very day, to original specifications. Apparently no more than three people at any given time have since known the precise recipe of Benedictine, although there have been countless attempts to duplicate the drink. Another classic liqueur still retains its religious/medicinal flavour. Today Chartreuse is made in Tarragona, Spain, and Voiron, France, by monks of the Carthusian (Charterhouse) Order. Also brandy-based, Chartreuse owes its unique flavour to certain extracts of countless herbs and plants specified in a recipe dating from 1605. A group of French army officers tried the liqueur in 1848 and undertook to make it known everywhere. There are two modern-day alternatives of Chartreuse, green and yellow, of which the green is the stronger, the yellow the sweeter. Goldwasser (or Danziger Goldwasser) is a liqueur of around thirty spices originally concocted by Dutch alchemists in the old port of Danzig, to render the drinker immune to death. It actually contains inert flakes of 24-carat gold, which you drink! At the time gold was believed to hold the key to eternal life. It took Paracelsus, the Swiss physician, to blow the whistle on the mysticism of gold, and to redirect the energies of the scientists hitherto engaged in near-witchcraft towards the making of medicines and potions designed to alleviate the many ills of the human species, even if they’re only around for a single lifetime.
