by Iain Gately
The behavior of the hippies seemed evidence for Dr. Humphry Osmond’s theory that LSD and alcohol did not mix. However, and despite its potential to control alcoholism, acid was outlawed in 1966. Its prohibition was accomplished almost without resistance. The general public perceived it to be a dangerous drug, on a par with other proscribed substances such as heroin and cocaine. While the ban was not an immediate success—by the time Hunter S. Thompson was writing of its ubiquity in the Hashbury, it had been illegal for a year—its use declined, probably from natural causes as much as federal prohibition. Its tendency to make its devotees imitate schizophrenics, especially after repeated use, caused demand to tail away—it was scarcely worth bootlegging. According to Thompson, writing in 1971, the decline was due to a different Zeitgeist in America: “The big market, these days, is in Downers. . . . What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up— whatever short circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. . . . Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare on the 1971 market as pure acid. . . .‘Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.”
In the event, the dip in the popularity of alcohol among the young, and a general fashion for alternative intoxicants, proved to be temporary. Some had never abandoned booze: Thompson displayed a steadfast devotion to the bottle and, in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, argued its utility in mitigating the effects of psychedelic drugs. He also advised new readers that if they wanted to appreciate his style, which he christened gonzo journalism, they should inject a half-pint of rum, tequila, or bourbon “straight into the stomach” in order to approach the material in the proper frame of mind. The dominant sentiment in Fear and Loathing is pessimism. In contrast to the optimism of On the Road, and even Easy Rider, both of which hoped to inject new vigor into the American Dream, Fear and Loathing was written as its requiem. The psychedelics’ visions for their country had been impractical and unpopular. Many of their icons turned to drink. Jim Morrison, aka the Lizard King, lead singer of the Doors, who once sang about getting high on The Ed Sullivan Show, was getting drunk in front of seven thousand fans at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami by 1969. Janis Joplin, whose soulful voice had tantalized hippies at the Monterey Festival in 1968 and at Woodstock in ’69, was a diehard fan of Southern Comfort; the same nectar was also the favorite of Ronald C. “Pigpen” McKernan, who augmented it with Thunderbird tonic wine, and who died of his drinking habit in 1973. His tomb was inscribed:
RONALD C. MCKERNAN
1945-1973
PIGPEN WAS
AND IS NOW FOREVER
ONE OF THE
GRATEFUL DEAD
While the hippies were growing their hair, espousing Eastern mysticism and peace, and tripping out on contraband acid, a far larger number of their peer group were having their heads cropped and their bodies disciplined and dressed in uniforms in preparation for a tour with the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Between 1964, when America first started sending significant numbers of troops to the country, and 1973, when the last of its forces were withdrawn, over two million Americans served in the Vietnam War. The majority of the combatants were conscripts; their average age was nineteen. Despite their youth, they were provided with a beer ration; indeed, beer was considered to be sufficiently important to their well-being to be helicoptered into battle zones alongside food. The standard issue was two cans per man per day. If possible, a hundred-pound block of ice per platoon was also provided so that the brews could be enjoyed at the right temperature.
Those serving in Vietnam could augment their fighting rations at the post exchanges, or PXs. Lest they overindulge, their purchases of beer were restricted to three cases per month. They were also provided with drinking places. Private soldiers could buy beer, by the can or case, at the EM (enlisted man) clubs, aka malt shops. Two grades of brew were available, regular (costing $2.40/case) and premium ($3.00). Quality was an important issue in Vietnam. The local beer, Ba Mu’o’i Ba, or “33” lager, was nicknamed “tiger’s piss” and considered to be about as drinkable. Some American brands, according to correspondents of the age, were treated with the preservative formaldehyde, to proof them against the agitation and high temperatures they would encounter on military bases. This additive was reputed to make drinkers lightheaded and served as a scapegoat for drunkenness.
The presence of so much alcohol in a war zone, especially on the big firebases, sometimes led to confusion. The journalist Michael Herr recorded visiting one such camp where booze had got the upper hand: “The colonel in command was so drunk that day that he could hardly get his words out, and when he did, it was to say things like, ‘We aim to make good and goddammit sure that if those guys try anything cute they won’t catch us with our pants down.’ The main mission there was to fire H & I, but one man told us that their record was the worst in the whole Corps, probably the whole country, they’d harassed and interdicted a lot of sleeping civilians . . . even a couple of American patrols, but hardly any Viet Cong.”
Vietnam was a relatively wet war. The tropical climate encouraged the consumption of cold drinks, and intoxication relieved the stress of combat among troops when they were off duty. While some resorted to marijuana, more chose alcohol as their transport to amnesia. Their preference had the tacit support of high command. It was better that fighting men bonded over a few cans or a bottle than that they smoked themselves into introspection and started to question why they were there. Indeed, mass sessions of drunken bonding seem to have been permitted, on appropriate occasions, as being useful to morale. The writer Tim O’Brien pictured one such event—the Christmas festivities at LZ Gator—in If I Should Die in a Combat Zone:
Now and then, to help slice the monotony into endurable segments, floor shows came to LZ Gator. Korean girls, Australian girls, Japanese girls, Philippine girls, all doing the songs and routines and teases that must be taught to them in some giant convention hall in Las Vegas. . . . Each show started with one of those unrecognizable acid-rock songs, faded off into “I Want to Go Home—Oh, How I Want to GO Home,” then a medley of oldies-and-still-goodies, none of them very good. Then some humor, then—thank God, at last—the stripper. . . . Everyone drank. Most of us drank in excess, but the colonel would kill one beer and stop there. Then the climax came. The men, roaring drunk, with tears in their eyes, would plead with the stripper—beg her, bribe her—to finish the job. But nothing ever came of it. We went away exhausted.
In addition to providing such home comforts as were feasible to combat troops, the authorities gave them local leave—in Vietnam, in other Asian countries, in Australia—and in every place, whether feted as heroes, fleeced as tourists, or hated as invaders, they won a reputation as hard drinkers with their thirsts. Asian children lined up to sell them liquor in the streets, Australians welcomed them into their veterans’ halls and plied them with beer. However, when many of the same men got back to the United States, they were denied entry to bars on account of their youth. The minimum drinking age in America remained at its post-Prohibition high of twenty-one, as, indeed, did the age at which its citizens could vote.
These discrepancies became important political issues in the United States. It was wrong to require people to fight, without giving them a say in whether their country went to war. In 1971 the franchise was extended to eighteen-year-olds by the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution. A similar line of reasoning was applied to drinking. If you could trust a nineteen-year-old with an M16 or a fighter jet, then why not with a can of beer when he got home? Moreover, some of the men then in power could remember coming back from World War I to Prohibition. Why inflict the same letdown on your own grandchildren? If they were old enough to fight, they were old enough to drink. In the early 1970s, thirty states decided to correct the anomaly and lowered their minimum drinking ages to eighteen.
In the same decade that grunts in Vietnam were sipping on their beer rations and the hippies of the
Hashbury were eschewing alcohol for acid, a quiet revolution took place in the vineyards around the San Francisco Bay. California wine production had been growing steadily since repeal. In 1946, it had passed a hundred million gallons for the first time and in 1971 broke the two-hundred-million-gallon barrier. Most of this growth had come from fewer, larger wineries—America’s vintners, like its brewers, had consolidated. However, a counterculture emerged in the late sixties in the form of small boutique wineries, dedicated to excellence rather than volume. The prophet of quality was Andre Tchelistcheff, who came from France to the Beaulieu Winery, one of the few class vineyards to survive Prohibition, in 1937. He was horrified at the crude production methods then current—people grew port grapes next to Riesling vines, they flung sackloads of sulphur and chunks of ice into the must as it fermented, and pumped the resulting mess into concrete tanks to mature. Little by little over the following decades, Tchelistcheff succeeded in sorting out his vineyards, brought the concept of temperature control into the process of fermentation, and introduced oak barrels in which the improved juice might settle and become an attractive wine.
His apostles were assisted in their quest for excellence by the research of Dr. Albert Winkler at UC Davis, who invented a heat summation system to determine what type of grape would be best suited to a particular area of California. Heat summation quantified the number of “degree days” of sunshine the area received, matched these against European equivalents, and recommended appropriate grapes and methods of cultivation. Bordeaux, for instance, had two thousand five hundred degree days per annum, the same as Napa, suggesting that the valley and nearby Sonoma could be perfect for Cabernet Sauvignon vines and claret-style reds, while the flanks of their enclosing hills had a similar profile to those in Burgundy, where Chardonnay was planted to make white wines.
A few veterans of Prohibition, including Inglenook, Krug, and Mondavi, were quick to follow the trail blazed by Tchelistcheff and Winkler. They were joined in the 1960s by a fresh generation of American winemakers who were intent on creating spectacular vintages. The newcomers extended the hippy mantra then current across San Francisco Bay into something positive—tune in, turn on, drop out, make wine. There was also something of the frontier spirit at work among them. Hugh Johnston, writing of a visit made to the vineyards of northern California in 1963, declared himself to be “enthralled . . . with what I had tasted” but “appalled at the lack of interest and recognition by the public, or facilities for them to visit the Napa Valley with the slightest degree of comfort.”
The facilities may have been primitive, but the New Age winemakers were not. Following Winkler’s data, they ranged up and down the Pacific Coast. In the late 1950s, a UC Davis graduate, Richard Sommer, scouted north, making wine in Oregon and Washington, before setting up the Hillcrest Vineyard in the Umpqua Valley. In 1965, David Lett planted Pinot Noir at his Eyrie Vineyard in Oregon. Meanwhile, in Sunnyside, Washington, a group of wine-loving professors at the state university planted a handful of acres with vines with the aim of producing what they termed varietals, i.e., wines made from a single type of grape and intended to exhibit its ideal characteristics. The Sunnysiders crafted their first vintages in a garage in Seattle and soon had enough fans to turn their hobby into a business—the Columbia Winery.
By the early 1970s the fruits of the American quality revolution were apparent. Boutique wineries were making spectacular varietals, some of which reflected the best properties of the European wines on which they had been modeled. Cabernet Sauvignons and Chardonnays showed especial promise. Hugh Johnston was followed by other foreign oenophiles to Napa, and California wines acquired a cult status overseas. Some were so good, it was rumored, that they eclipsed their French prototypes. The issue was put to the test in 1976 when Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant based in Paris, organized a blind tasting of California’s best, pitting them against some of France’s grandest crus. He lined up six American Cabernets against such elixirs as Mouton Rothschild ’70, and a Haut-Brion of the same year, and six Chardonnays against four white Burgundies. He assembled a jury of nine French men and women, the crème de la crème of French wine tasting, including growers from Bordeaux and Burgundy and the sommelier of the Tour d’Argent Restaurant in Paris. While a number of journalists were invited, only one, George M. Taber of Time magazine, attended. Although his two-thousand-word report on the tasting was slimmed down to a four-paragraph article in the June 7 edition of Time, the event turned out to be the biggest story of the twentieth century in the world of wine. In Taber’s words, “The unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul.”
Taber’s account of the contest suggests that the most respected connoisseurs of wine in France were unprepared, both in mind and in palate, for the possibility that French wine could be made better somewhere else: “As they swirled, sniffed, sipped, and spat, some judges were instantly able to separate an imported upstart from an aristocrat. More often, the panel was confused. ‘Ah, back to France!’ exclaimed [a French judge] after sipping a 1972 Chardonnay from the Napa Valley. ‘That is definitely California. It has no nose,’ said another judge— after downing a Bâtard-Montrachet ’73. Other comments included such Gallic gems as ‘This is nervous and agreeable,’ and ‘This soars out of the ordinary.’” When the scores of the judges were compiled, the “top-soaring” red was a 1972 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. American Chardonnays, meanwhile, took four out of the first five places among the whites. Robert Louis Stevenson’s prophecy that “the smack of California earth will linger on the palate of your grandson” had been fulfilled.
The results of the Judgment of Paris were played down in France. They received little immediate coverage, and subsequently were explained away as having been rigged by pitting California’s best years against unusually weak French vintages. French producers, however, took notice, and some invested in Californian soil, following a lead established by the champagne producer Moët Hennessy, which had bought land in Napa in 1973. In the same year that the global arbitrators of taste in wine had chosen California as the best source of Bordeaux-style reds, and Burgundy-style whites, Moët released a Napa Valley Brut, which hinted at the potential of the Golden State for making outstanding fizz. It was good enough to induce Piper-Heidsieck, another French champagne house, to invest in neighboring Sonoma, and to provoke the curiosity of the Coca-Cola Company, which bought two California wineries in 1977.
International fame and an increasing domestic appetite for American wine led to rapid growth in production. In 1979 California created 314 million gallons of poetic juice—half as much again as the year in which Stag’s Leap ’72 had been born. Most of this went down American throats: Between 1969 and 1979 per capita consumption close to doubled. While Thomas Jefferson’s dream that the United States might one day become a nation of vintners and wine drinkers had yet to be fulfilled, progress toward its realization was, at last, apparent.
34 WESTERNIZATION
The spirit of curiosity that had led Americans to experiment with alternative intoxicants and to perfect their winemaking skills was also at work in Asia over the third quarter of the twentieth century. It was strongest in Japan, where it took the guise of an ardent desire to embrace all things Western. This longing extended to Western drinks, which were perceived of as being essential to the culture of the Occident—as important as wearing an English suit or adopting American business practices. Western temperance, in contrast, was not considered to be a vital part of the dynamic culture the Japanese wished to imitate. In consequence, they started drinking beer and whisky in preference to sake and their other traditional beverages.
Their motivations for switching to beer were reflected in the ways in which it was promoted in Japan. Beer was portrayed as cool, modern, and American—as the lifeblood of that go-getting nation, whose industrial prowess the Japanese were keen to rival. The Asahi Brewing Company introduced canned suds to Japan in 1958, and the product was a runaway success: What better
symbol could there be of economic vigor than the convenient, hygienic, transportable, and disposable beer can? The importance of an American connection was apparent in Sapporo beer’s advertising campaign of the same year, built upon the slogan “Munich, Sapporo, Milwaukee.” This was a clever bridge between the pre-World War II perception of beer in Japan as a traditional Teutonic brew and the new and desirable Yankee dynamism. The urge to imitate was apparent among corporations as well as consumers. Following the introduction of a minimum-level-of-productionlaw in 1959—no brewery could make less than two million liters (528,000 gallons)—the Japanese brewing industry underwent an American-style consolidation, and the country’s brewers contracted into five: Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo, Suntory, and Orion.
Whisky was also adopted as a symbol of the West, where whisky drinking, like playing golf, was believed to be the hallmark of every successful businessman. Whisky became the darling of Japanese white-collar workers, to whom it was an aspirational drink that conferred an aura of power upon its consumer. The market, thanks to tariff barriers, was dominated by domestic brands. Suntory led the field. In 1950 it released what was to become its flagship marque, Suntory OLD. This proved so popular that by 1961 it was being exported to the United States.69 While OLD and its ilk were packaged to resemble scotch, their flavor profiles were different from the fluids they had been created to emulate. The Japanese drank not just for show, but also for pleasure, and their tastes were dissimilar to those of the average Pittsburgh steel magnate. The difference, according to Hideaki Kito, a master blender for Kirin whisky, was dictated by the Japanese diet. In his opinion, the taste of authentic Japanese whisky had to be based on “Japanese culture, Japanese food. We eat a lot of fish, for example, therefore we have to create a match for this with the whisky. Our research showed that clean and estery whiskies are much better suited to the Japanese palate.”