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Say Bartender,
Make Mine Tuna on the Rocks
by Maggie Van Ostrand |
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In
the Bible, Jesus turns water into wine and multiplies two fishes into enough to
feed 12,000 people, including women and children. Can China top that? Seems as
though they're going to try.
Sun Keman, of China's port city of Dalian,
has formed the Dalian Fisherman's Song Maritime Biological Brewery, intending
to turn fish into wine. I'm not kidding. I checked it out on Snopes and it's not
a hoax. They already have orders from Japan, Russia, and other parts of China.
Xinhua News Agency reported "Different from China's thousands of years of brewing,
[this] brewery will clean, boil, and ferment fish for making wine."
I don't
know about anyone else, but I like my wine made the old-fashioned way, from grapes.
At least French wine doesn't have eyes that can look back at you from the bottom
of the glass. Then again, I had to give up drinking altogether when I saw the
worm in mescal; even though it was dead, it looked healthy to me.
Alvin
Starkman, M.A., LL.B., wrote a comprehensive article for the ezine, Mexico Connect,
about the worm in mescal. Starkman says "The gusano worm is in fact not a worm,
but rather a caterpillar, an infestation to which the agave plant is susceptible.
However, in the production and sale of mezcal, ... prior to there being any labeling
or regulation ... , a gusanito was inserted into a bottle of mezcal as proof to
the purchaser that the liquor had a sufficiently high alcohol content. The worm's
preservation in the mezcal, without any decomposition, signified that the alcohol
content ought to be acceptable to the purchaser." So okay then, it wasn't a worm
in my mescal, it was a caterpillar. This is better?
Fish-into-wine and
worms-into-mescal could be considered prime marketing by Mother Nature. TV commercials
for such drinks could be made even more effective by using the popular Guinness
Beer commercials with the two geezers shouting "Brilliant!"
Another effective
marketing tool, if tool be the correct word, would be perpetuation of the myth
that pulque, the respected drink of Aztec elders, high priests, and warriors,
sprang from the breasts of the Goddess Mayahel, of which she had 400. Imagine
what that would mean to Victoria's Secret bra sales?
Mayahel was the "official"
Goddess of Pulque, Alcohol, and Agave, at least until she entered rehab. You can't
beat those Aztecs. We only have Paris Hilton.
British writer Chris Aspin
has written extensively about pulque and states that today, "the foamy, slightly
viscous and foul-smelling booze is slowly disappearing, a victim of the rising
popularity of beer and of failing to shake off its image as a poor man's tipple."
Aspin claims that, while the drink remains the same, there has been a
"change in perception -- from nectar to nasty." As opposed to the turn of the
20th Century when there were 1,500 pulque bars in Mexico City, there are now only
about 100 which Aspin refers to as "... squalid dives only frequented by the old
and poor." 75-year-old Palemon Huesca, Zempoala's pulque maker, calls pulque "a
dying drink," and his vats only make 500 litres a day instead of the 5,000 litres
of 30 years ago. He said "Young people tend not to drink pulque anymore." Small
wonder, if it's "slightly viscous and foul-smelling." Sounds like a drink of medical
waste. Even the worm doesn't like it.
Still, it's a sad state of affairs
when Mexican pulque, dating back at least 2,000 years, might eventually be replaced
by a liquefied, fermented fish.
If we will drink wine made from creatures
of the sea, perhaps the next big thing will be beer made from creatures of the
air. Bird beer? One thing is certain -- no matter what the source of the booze,
if it has 400 breasts, men will buy it. |
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