I am infatuated with this Calvados. I want to hold a cup of it between fantastically callused hands as I wake up with the sun. I want to appreciate it in a yellow pavilion between rounds of Russian roulette with a jealous baron. I want to put too much of it away playing dice in the winter, drink it in my underwear while I look out the window waiting for summer to come. I want to and I will. The nights are getting warmer; it won’t be long.
Because this drink does something that I love in wine, but which I don’t often encounter in spirits. It seems to speak to a life that it had before it became a drink. Maybe not of a place in the sense of “terroir” per se, because if it speaks of a place I think it speaks of many places, but of a materiality prior to that artful abstraction that is potable alcohol (apologies for the alliteration). An earthiness, but also a worldliness, in the original sense of the word. For it tastes like apples. Apples in the world.
When one thinks of distilled spirits, one tends to imagine the essence of a thing, be it grain or grape or cane, shorn of its impurities and elevated, transformed. A pure expression. But a pure expression of what? It is difficult not to get entangled in metaphysical analogies, given the common vocabulary of spirits. In this case, however, the conventional (metaphysical) understanding of the spirit as prior to the flesh is confounded by a (alcoholic) spirit that tastes so distinctly of apples—not of some abstract or Platonic ideal of apples, but rather of apples of varying ripeness, the crisp and tart mingling with the already bruised and almost-rank-in-their-blunt-and-volatile-sweetness, apples that come from trees and hang on trees and eventually fall from trees, get kicked around in the dirt or covered with leaves or eaten by stupid pigs—that it can only be understood as a spirit of the flesh. Not a spirit that animates the world, but one that is animated by the world, an expression of all the impurities, failures, and accidents of life. Note that this is quite at odds with Cartesian or transcendentalist notions of body and spirit being of irreconcilable and fundamentally different stuff. The soul in this picture is not confined for a time to the living hell of materiality, but rather is forged in and of that flesh. Essence follows existence.
Likewise, this suggests a different reading of the idea of eau-de-vie, the French term for various brandies and fruit distillates, which literally translates as “water of life.” Deriving from the Latin aqua vitae, and having its roots seemingly in Arabic scientific and alchemical investigation, eau-de-vie retains something of this transcendentalist gloss. To the extent that alcohol was viewed as a water of life, it was in a medical sense, as a life-giving elixir or purgative; or at points in the Middle Ages a metaphor for the purifying elixir of divinity. That which washes away the sins of the flesh. “My Soule had Caught an Ague,” Edward Taylor cried, “and like Hell Her thirst did burn…”1 But in this, my so-to-speak “immanentalist” approach, the water of life runs much more troubled and murky.
The cheap, precious aesthete in me hoped to find some greater insight by inquiring into the origins of the word distillation. However, all this yielded was a reminder of how reaching is my above metaphysical speculation. The “purification of essence” sense of the word seems to be of more recent vintage, rather than the root of its etymology. Distill refers, quite empirically, to the formation of drops; in fact, to the dropping or dripping of drops: destillare. Stilla = drop, the diminutive of stiria, for icicle (how cute). “To trickle down or fall in minute drops, as rain; tears,” reads the Oxford English Dictionary.
And so, by speaking of distillates rather than spirits, we may be firmly back on materialist terrain, because yes, obviously alcoholic spirits are only metaphorically, not metaphysically, the souls of their source ingredients. I am not above using booze as a way of thinking through and around the materialist-transcendentalist divide, however. If the Calvados may be said to be a pure expression, not of a Platonic or ur-apple, but of a very worldly apple, so may I make use of these impressions to work toward some notion of essential qualities being not a priori, but contingent, accidental.
Anyway, it is good. I don’t usually like saying that things taste like “late afternoon sun coming through the leaves,” but there is some of that. It also tastes like autumn and hay and butterscotch. It tastes like what you needed all winter. Or I suppose to save time you could say “rustic, and a little funky.” You know, like Levon Helm and the Band. But French.
1 Edward Taylor, “Meditation 10, Joh. 6.55. My Blood is Drinke indeed,” quoted in “Edward Taylor and the Cleansing of ‘Aqua Vitae,’” Kathy Siebel and Thomas M. Davis, Early American Literature, vol. 4, no. 3, 1969/1970.