An Apology for Demon Rum

I don’t much like sparkling wines, but what would a wedding or New Year’s Eve, or a graduation party or a Bar Mitzvah be without at least one glass all around of “bubbly?” No toast worth its recipient should be offered without some of the extract of the grape.

Spirits are another thing altogether. It’s only recently that I could honestly give a reason for why I buy one brand of scotch over another (apart from the obvious one of price). After more years of drinking the stuff than I care to admit (most of the time at the rate of a couple a week), I can now honestly express an opinion. Imagine my blush of amazement when I was given a drink at a friend’s house and exclaimed over the wonderful flavor and asked what it was. The friend doesn’t drink. He said, “Oh some kind of malt stuff I got for Christmas.” I knew I had arrived on the threshold of connoisseurship when I could with no prompting identify a difference from the standard brand I was used to and even appreciate its superior quality. Now I feel justified in the ABC Store when I choose one brand over another.

I grew up in a family where the parents had a dry Martini before dinner every night, served wine with every special meal, and drank highballs at parties. Booze didn’t have the lure of the forbidden for me. In spite of what I’ve just said, I’ve always been what some have referred to as a “cheap date.” I don’t have the head for a lot of anything.

When I was first going out on dates, the boys were in uniform, which meant that we went to bars and we drank. Very early on, I learned to evaluate an escort on how he dealt with my one-drink habit. It proved to be an excellent way to judge a man. That’s what I meant by the first line of these remarks. I hope my granddaughters can see that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles the way his date drinks — or doesn’t — as much as by how he handles his own drink.

I have yet to be proved wrong. For that, I value rum (and all its relatives).

Images: Wine white (top); Dry Martini (bottom), Wikipedia

Pages: 1 · 2

Relationships and Going Places, Entertaining, Meeting Places and Romance, Senior Women Web, Sightings, Joan L. Cannon, Cooking, Authors Add comments

An Apology for Demon Rum

More Articles