Spirits and Liqueurs – An Indispensible Medical Case

It’s possibly the bibulous equivalent of comfort food, but whenever I cast an eye over a shelf of liqueurs and spirits I can’t help thinking of all the good they’d do me. After all, alcohol is our oldest medicine. We just package it differently today – most of it, anyway. Ever since the famous physician Galen used the only medicine at his disposal – wine – to bathe deep lion-inflicted wounds upon the gladiators in second-century Pergamon, a close and successful working relationship has existed between the medical profession and the alcoholic beverage industry. Incidentally, Galen claimed not to have lost a single gladiator.

Medical practitioners have indeed invented many spirits and liqueurs themselves. While their original purpose may have been purely medicinal, we drink them today simply because we like them. And you never know when you might run short of penicillin. Some such liquors we developed to aid digestion, others as dressings for cuts and wounds. One was developed as a rather optimistic cure for the Bubonic Plague. Another was even developed to imbrue its drinker with eternal life.

The Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, incorporated wine into nearly each of his recorded remedies. Interestingly, he would match a specific wine with a particular ailment. Perhaps if alive today he might prescribe a dry red from the Margaret River, Hunter Valley, Barossa or McLaren Vale to cool fevers, act as a diuretic, an antiseptic or to assist convalescence; each a genuine Hippocratic use of wine.

Patently a sensible chap, Hippocrates did recommend ‘a total abstinence from wine’ if a patient suffered from an ‘overpowering heaviness of the head, or if the brain is affected’.

Dr Franciscus de la Boe known also as Dr Sylvius, a professor of medicine at the Dutch University of Leiden in the eighteenth century, invented gin. He intended it 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 its own precise formula. The fundamental flavourings likely to be contained in gin are coriander, cardamom, 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, originally 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.

But seventy years later the original formula somehow came into the hands of one M. Alexandre Le Grand, who established the present secular concern which continues to produce the liqueur to original specifications to this very day. Apparently no more than three people at any given time have since known the precise recipe of Benedictine, although countless have attempted 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.

16th century monks inhabiting the Dijon area of France are believed to have invented the blackcurrant liqueur, creme de cassis. Canon Felix Kir, who centuries later was a leader of the French resistance in Lyon, is credited with the discovery that if you add a few drops of creme de cassis to a glass of undistinguished white, you can drink far more of the mixture than either of the two separate ingredients put together. The result? A Kir Royale.

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 a Swiss physician, Paracelsus, to blow the whistle on the mysticism of gold, and to redirect scientific energies hitherto engaged in near-witchcraft back towards the making of genuine medicines actually capable of prolonging human life.

Much of the mystique has vanished from the business of creating new liqueur. It really has got to the stage that you can almost invent one out of anything that comes to mind. In New Zealand they even make one from the felt on deer horns; not exactly a pretty concept.

Scientific wizzkids with palates like Picasso have conjured up a whole new range of indulgently bare-all liqueurs and cocktail bases which have completely revolutionised the cocktail bar. Just crack open a bottle of Suntory Midori, De Kuyper Original Peachtree or Baitz Rockmelon and you’re so overcome by the quality, freshness and fragrance of the aromas, so could eat them. Medicine they truly may not be, but who on earth ever made a cocktail with cough syrup?


Breakaway:

The drinking world has experienced a stormy relationship with dairy-based liqueurs since the its first appearance of Baileys Irish Cream. Thick, sweet and creamy, with a spirity afterburn so subtle it has fooled millions, Baileys’ success has inspired hundreds of imitators.

So, while some may observe a strictly ho-hum approach towards the introduction of yet another spin-off, the House of Godet’s new cream liqueur, simply called ‘Godet’, which matches youthful spirit, aged cognac and white Belgian chocolate in a snazzy off-white bottle, is certain to appeal to the club set. The drink is refined and mellow, all smoothness without a single hard edge. Sure it’s sweet, but with a modest alcoholic strength of 15, it won’t create too much harm if taken on the rocks or mixed in a cocktail, where it could be interchangeable for any other spirit-based cream liqueur. Being something of a sucker for a white Magnum ice-cream, I’m tempted to keep a bottle near the fridge. You just never know.

Godet is sold in 700ml, 375 ml and 50ml sizes. The recommended retail price 700ml is $29.99. It is distributed in Australia by Swift & Moore Pty Ltd. Please login to post comment