{"id":1552,"date":"2011-10-09T19:47:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T00:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1552"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:13:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:13:43","slug":"berry-brothers-number-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1552","title":{"rendered":"Berry Brothers Number Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Thanksgiving Day and treats galore \u2013 so many things for which to give thanks\u2026<\/p>\n

The first is No.3 London Dry Gin. It came to me wrapped in tissue paper printed faintly with a map of St. James\u2019s Street in apple green ink. This is a part of London which\u00a0is indelibly familiar to me. It lies between the place where I grew up \u2013 Chelsea \u2013 and the area where my parents worked, the theatres of the West End.\u00a0\u00a0No. 3 St James\u2019s was an address that rang a particularly happy little bell in memory\u2019s carillon: Berry Bros. & Rudd, the world\u2019s oldest wine merchant, in business since 1698. My mum sometimes ordered a case of wine from Berry Bros. The company specialized in making things easy for English customers. I remember bottles labelled simply \u201cHock\u201d (totally delicious Riesling from the Rhine) or \u201cGood Ordinary Claret\u201d (no need to confuse matters by naming the deuxi\u00e8me-tier Ch\u00e2teau that had created the wine \u2013 and besides it was always excellent). Inside the ancient premises is a room called The Parlour \u2013 one of the oldest rooms in the shop \u2013 where Lord Byron once dined. So did Napoleon III, who was French. So did Prime Minister William Pitt (though I don\u2019t know if that was Pitt the Elder or Pitt the Younger \u2013 probably the Younger, since he drank his weight in Port while running the country).<\/p>\n

Berry Bros. is now in the business of providing the heirs and successors of the Pitts and Byrons with the wherewithal to continue conquering worlds politick and literary \u2013 namely gin. Byron chugged gin and water while writing Don Juan (there are few poems I enjoy more) and the No.3 would have been right up his all\u00e9e. It\u2019s a real gin. By which I mean it doesn\u2019t taste of exotic flowers, or cucumber and roses, or citrus fruit. It tastes roundly of juniper (okay, cardamom, grapefruit peel, orange, earthy angelica and coriander seed mitigate the whack) but mostly it\u2019s perfumed, pine-forest-bitter, antique-Christmassy, venison-gamey,\u00a0 juniper \u2013 dry as a bone, clean as the London style should always be, and spectacular in a Martini with a twist of lemon. If you need olives, have them on the side. The LCBO has it on its shelves (look for the bottle with the key pressed into its gizzard) \u2013 and so should we all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanksgiving Day and treats galore \u2013 so many things for which to give thanks\u2026 The first is No.3 London Dry Gin. It came to me wrapped in tissue paper printed faintly with a map of St. James\u2019s Street in apple green ink. This is a part of London which\u00a0is indelibly familiar to me. It lies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[98,1,100],"tags":[502,501],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1552"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1969,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}