Little Anthony, my host in Oxford last week, is a journo and PR man on the motorsport beat. He'd just come back from a couple of days in Finland, hanging out with some local rally drivers immediately prior to the Finnish Rally. He found the experience alcoholically exhausting (ah, those Scandinavians!), and was wimpily invoking this as an excuse for a radically reduced drinking capacity when he got home.
So, what do they drink in Finland, we asked.
Pear cider, apparently, is the answer. It is quite the craze over there at the moment. (I wonder if there's a long history of local manufacture? I can't imagine why anyone would think of importing something like that. Although the cider people do seem to have very slick marketing these days. Pear varieties have sprung up as a surprisingly successful novelty item in England in the past year or two, it seems. And the Magner's brand [a really not very nice cider - from Ireland??] has sprung from obscurity, perhaps from non-existence, to prominence in the UK in not very much longer. It is strange, strange.)
Pear cider, it seems, meets most of the essential criteria expected by the Scandinavian drinker: it's sweet, disgusting, expensive, and deceptively strong.
However, it's not really strong enough. So, the fashion is to drink it with a vodka top!
Little Anthony was goaded into demonstrating this for us the other day. He slept in very late the next morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment