Q: Was gin (also known as "gin") more commonly seen as a medicine rather than a drink for recreation?
A: Exactly. In fact, it is strange to say that the concept of distilled spirits has its roots in traditional Arabic alchemy. In Baghdad in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, you can feel this rising cultural upsurge in almost everywhere—a frenzy of research, where people try to study the nature of the universe and study it in different ways. Distillation has thus become a very powerful research method.
Many early alchemists believed that when you distilled wine, beer, or other alcohol in a certain way, you would eventually feel the power of human life. So people called it aqua vitae – the water of life. Later people began to mix juniper nuts with this distilled wine. Juniper nuts have a long history as a drug, especially when women give birth. Therefore, people mix this powerful medicinal herb with wine. Over time, as you said, it was considered a drug.
Q: How did this wine get notorious, especially in eighteenth-century England?
A: I think it comes down to high-level politics. In 1689, in England, we experienced the Glorious Revolution. The Catholic King James II was deposed, and william, Prince of Orange, a Protestant Dutchman, ascended the throne. When William ascended to the throne, he knew that he needed to rely on the support of many nobles.
William I, Prince of Orange by Charles Terner
The main income of these people comes from the large-scale agricultural estates they run. Therefore, William knew that if he wanted to sit firmly on the throne, he had to ensure that the price of food was stable and high. At that time, one of the first things he did was to deregulate alcohol brewing in Britain. As a result, almost anyone can make wine. This opens up new markets for food. Gin suddenly became unusually cheap. Anyone can brew gin, and almost everyone can afford it, and from this point on its reputation began to decline.
Q: It turned into a "gin mania."
A: That's right. This period lasted from 1720 to 1750. The public is uneasy, not only because of the low price of gin, but also because of the social impact it has caused.
William Hogarth's Gin Alley
The most famous masterpiece is probably a print by the British artist William Hogarth called "Gin Alley", which depicts the terrible social malaise caused by gin. The people in that painting are almost all indulgent and depraved—in the painting, the child is falling out of the arms of a half-naked woman, and she herself is sitting on the ground on her back, visibly drunk. The other man looked like an addict, most likely a gin addict.
In fact, if you're looking for something today that's the equivalent of eighteenth-century gin, it's cocaine.
Q: So what ultimately made gin revered?
A: There are several factors. First of all, we must mention that this is a very important invention of the United States. Perhaps one of America's most important cultural contributions to the world was the invention of the cocktail.
In the nineteenth century, first Americans and then Europeans used to mix wine with other things: bitter beer or quinine water, and a variety of other spices. This led to the beginning of respect for gin (gin is one of the base liquors commonly used in cocktails). There is another seasoning in the cocktail cabinet.
The second factor that makes gin revered is also the more common combination of gin and quinine water. Imagine that in the nineteenth century, one of the biggest problems Faced by European colonists who went to the tropics was malaria – an extremely terrible disease that killed thousands of Europeans and Africans. The only effective treatment at the time was the drug known in the UK as quinine.
Image credit: Architect Magazine
The problem is, quinine is very bitter. So, in the nineteenth century, many companies began to work on a variety of ways to make quinine easier to get into. So there was quinine water. By the late nineteenth century, British colonists found quinine water and gin to pair well, mixing with a refreshing plant aromatic taste. So the British began to mix gin and quinine water, making it a specialty drink for British colonists, and in the twentieth century, the habit was brought back to Britain. These are the two factors that have made gin revered.
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