Do you know what a gallo is?

Humankind has a long relationship with mind altering substances. We chew mushrooms and leaves, we sniff things, we smoke all sorts of vegetation, we (not me you understand but we, humankind) drink snow laced with reindeer urine and, for lots of us there is a close relationship with fermented and distilled alcohol. Around here the most obvious local booze is wine, and the variants on it like vermouth, but there are others. In fact, years ago, I wrote an article about it for the old TIM magazine.

That TIM article was inspired by a visit to the bar in Calle Sol in the Santa Catalina district of Pinoso. We were in Santa Catalina for their fiestas, I had never been in the bar there and, once inside, I realised that every second person in the bar was drinking cantueso. I'd been blissfully unaware of its existence till that moment but it's actually readily available around here. It's fine, not my preferred tipple but, if you like the brandy based drinks like Ponche Caballero, you may like it.

In a similar way this post was prompted by reading a book and a visit. The local book club, based in Pinoso library, chose to read Modorra by Rafael Azuar. The book is set in Salinas. We followed up on the reading of the book by going on a visit to places mentioned in the text. As we stood outside the old posada (posadas are the old inns - if this were Shakespeare they're where we'd have Falstaff drinking flagons of ale, eating mutton, sleeping on paillasses and rubbing shoulders with muleteers) we read out paragraphs which referred to the building. In one section the text mentioned that the inn users were not so keen on Coca Cola and preferred tried and tested drinks like absinthe, wine, carajillo, paloma or gallo. 

I didn't know what gallo was - other than the Spanish word for cockerel. I know that absinthe is the high spirit aniseed flavoured drink, wine I think we all know, carajillo is a spirit laced coffee (usually brandy but you can ask for a splash of anything). Now paloma I happened to know because years ago, when I first arrived in Pinoso and we were doing Spanish classes with Cruz, we went over to Monforte del Cid for some sort of Adult Education get together. Monforte is well known for producing anis. To be honest I've never quite been able to work out the difference between absinthe and anise but the one from Monforte is very much like Pastis or Ouzo or Sambuca or Raki or Aquavit. Generally this sort of aniseedy tasting alcohol is taken with water. The local version turns cloudy white with water, the same colour as a dove and hence, paloma. 

Nobody else in the group knew gallo either. I wondered if it were the lemon flavoured anis. No, that one is called a canario, a canary, again, presumably, for the colour. Wikipedia doesn't know either. I think this is something we could all do, in search of cultural enlightenment you understand. We could go into as many bars as possible and ask for a gallo until we eventually find out what it is. Until we discover what it is we will have no option but to drink something else while we're there.

No ice cubes for me

Sometimes visitors put Spain on the other side of the North South divide. The Third World side. Guests ask us if the water is safe to drink. On one, very embarrassing, occasion a house guest wanted to know the price of some towels on a market stall so we asked on her behalf. Using her fingers as euro markers our guest offered half the amount to the stall holder. The trader snorted and turned away. Maggie and I inspected the shine on our shoes.

There is a similar sort of appreciation of Spanish traffic law. Somebody who lived near us used to always drive the wrong way up a one way street to leave his habitual parking space. "Oh, it's Spain, everybody does it," he said. That's not true. Most Spaniards obey signs and the like in exactly the same way as most Britons do. He was applying his own prejudices to the situation. The other day I turned down a drink, an alcoholic drink, "No, I've had a couple and I'll have to drive in four or five hours so I'd better not". My travelling companion said something like "Well, they don't bother much here - do they?". The answer is yes; they bother a lot.

There are two sets of Spanish alcohol limits. One, a more lenient limit, applies to people like me, your normal everyday non professional driver. The other is for lorry, coach, or delivery van drivers and the like - professional drivers. The same, lower, limits are applied to people who have passed their driving test within the last twelve months.

Then there is another division. There's a lower limit that gets you fined 500€ and puts four points on your licence and a higher limit that costs you 1,000€ and six points. Exceed that higher limit and you're looking at bans, driver re-education, community service and even prison time. The level when it becomes an offence is 0.25 miligrammes per litre of breath (0.15 mg/l for professionals and novices), it becomes a more serious offence at 0.5 mg/l (0.3 mg/l) and it gets deadly serious at 0.6 mg/l. For comparison the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland limit is higher, at 0.35 mg/l and even in abstemious Scotland it's 0.22 mg/l. The Spanish drugs limit is much easier. Zero. Anything above zero and you have a serious problem.

I've been breathalysed here four or five times here. All of them routine checks, all of them negative. Sometimes the checks were no big surprise - driving away from a pop festival at four in the morning but the Wednesday afternoon stop of everyone going through the toll gate on the underused section of the AP7 near Torrevieja was a little unexpected. The one where I had to remove the ignition key with my left hand whilst a man pointed a pump action shotgun at me was not an alcohol check! Also negative.

Last year the Traffic Division of the Guardia Civil did more than 5 million alcohol or drug tests. About 1.3% gave alcohol positives or around 95,000 drivers. The alcohol tests are random. A control is set up and every red car, or every car with just one occupant, or every third car is stopped - or whatever protocol they use. The drugs tests are usually done when someone is pulled over, either randomly or because of some traffic offence, and the police suspect drugs use. In that case the results are pretty astonishing. At least 35% in the semi random checks and around 55% for those stopped after a traffic violation test positive - cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines are the drugs of choice and in that order of precedence.

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I was very unsure whether to add this section. The best and safest amount of alcohol for driving is absolutely none. It's not just about fines and rules. The problem with alcohol is that it makes the driver less able to control the vehicle. Alcohol makes the possibility that a badly driven car will kill someone much more likely.

For most people 0.25 miligrammes of alcohol in a litre of breath doesn't translate into anything meaningful. How sober, tiddly or well drunk is 0.25 mg/l? I did find an article which suggested that a tercio (a 33 cl bottle) of a common Spanish beer (5.5% alcohol) would put most men just over the limit and that it would take that same "average" man about two hours to metabolise the booze. The same bottle of beer would put the "average" woman well over the lower limit and possibly on to the more penalised 0.5 mg/l limit. In her case she'd need nearly three hours to metabolise that bottle of beer. A glass of wine (how big is a glass?) might just leave most men under the lower limit whilst women would probably be in breathalyser trouble. And whilst it would take that woman about two hours to clear the alcohol from her system a man would do the same in eighty minutes. However accurate those figures are they do tend to suggest that the limits are very low. Definitely best to stick to the DGT slogan "At the wheel, not a drop".

One for the road?

I know it's perverse but I was pondering on the romanticism of the drunk the other day. Actually it was probably whilst I was in the HiperBer supermarket trying to decide whether to buy whisky or brandy. That pondering led me down Memory Lane - what was the name of that journalist? The one with the byline "so and so is unwell". The phrase appeared when there was no column because the man was too far gone to write. As I vainly struggled, synapses and neurons not doing what they should, that Mike Figgis film, the one with Elisabeth Shue and a Nicolas Cage bent on self destruction, came to mind. I liked the Cage character and I enjoyed the film. I occasionally wonder whether my own days will end in an alcoholic stupor.

That's where this post ground to a halt. I couldn't remember the name and I'd forgotten what the point of the post was going to be so I went to bed. When I awoke in the morning I was thinking Geoffrey. In fact it's Jeffrey, Google remembered, Jeffrey Bernard and it was the Spectator not the Evening Standard.

It's dead easy to drink too much in Spain. It's one of the stereotypes that exists about British  immigrants and Britons in Spain in general. Pint in hand and probably shouting. Not that Spaniards don't drink. Whenever I suggest to Spaniards that other Spaniards are pretty abstemious I often get reminded of botellones - when Spaniards gather together in a public place to socialise and drink alcohol. The participants are typically young people with a carrier bag laden with bottles and cartons full of booze, mixers and snacks. It didn't use to be at all unusual to see workers drinking a brandy or an anis alongside their coffee though, thinking about it, it's a while since I've seen that. What I've never seen is Spaniards drinking as though the stuff is going out of fashion.

The last litre bottle of brandy I bought was Terry, Spanish produced but perfectly palatable. It cost 8.69€ or about £7.70, J&B whisky was 11.65€ or about £10.32 though that was for the smaller 70cl bottle. Have a shot, un chupito, alongside your coffee and it will cost 1€ or about 88p for what would be a traditional double in a UK pub. I forget how much a 5 litre container of perfectly nice wine is from our local bodega but it's under 6€ - so the equivalent of a bit under 7 bottles of wine for not much over five of your British pounds.

Now imagine the situation. You are British. You're retired or you're not working. You are generally reasonably well off, comfortable cash wise. The weather is good, you can sit outside for a lot of the year. You're a little bit bored, not bored bored, but with plenty of time on your hands, you're a bit cut off from the world around you because you haven't quite mastered the local language and so what can you do with your time?

I'm off to Walk the Dog

Booze and fags are pretty cheap in Spain. At least I think they are. I haven't bought either in the UK for quite a while now so I'm just going on what visitors tell me. Certainly booze, in the form of home produced, Spanish, brandy is endangering my already weakened liver and my lungs are as claggy as those pits that trapped the woolly mammoths. That's thanks to ten cigars for the princely sum of 6€. To be fair I haven't actually smoked a cigar for a couple of weeks but my guess is the damage is done and that death by asphyxiation is round the corner.

When I was young pubs were tied houses, The Savile was Websters, The Wellington Bass, the New Inn was Ramsden's or maybe Bentley's Yorkshire Beers. Of course in time all the little breweries became part of huge conglomerates so it was Watney's or Ind Coope or Tetley's who owned the boozers. The last time I was in the UK that system seemed to have largely disappeared and pubs sold a variety of beers with improbable names. In Tesco's and Sainsbury's I presume there are still shelves and shelves of bottled beer from around the world.

Generally, in Spain, beer is beer. Obviously there are taste differences between the brands but, almost without exception, it's a light, alcoholic and fizzy pilsener type lager. Each region tends towards a particular manufacturer though the big brands are always available somewhere. Individual drinkers may have a preference for Mahou or Cruzcampo or Alhambra but, in general, brand is nowhere near as important as temperature. Beer has to be cold. On the two occasions when I have attempted to interest Spaniards in drinking British bitter they have complained loudly about the temperature - it's like broth - without mention of the taste.

There have always been a few, readily available, Spanish beers that have been out of the ordinary though the only two I can instantly bring to mind are Yuste and Voll Damm. Yuste is a beer with its roots back in the time when Spain ruled the Low Countries and is a dark Belgian type ale whilst the Voll Damm is a dark double malt lager. But suddenly, on the counter tops of bars all over Spain, there are lots of bottles of different beers on display. They don't seem to get drunk much but there they are.

Just to prove it to myself I had a look at the Cruzcampo site where there is Cruzcampo Cruzial with 100% selected hops (so the hops in their other beer aren't selected?), Cruzcampo Fresca (the authentic taste of recently brewed beer). On the San Miguel site they have a fresca too: it looks as though it may taste like the Mexican Corona or Sol whilst San Miguel Especial has toasted barley and overtones of licorice which is more or less the same description as San Miguel 1516. At least San Miguel Blu is different because it comes in a blue bottle and includes a touch of vodka. Actually the San Miguel site gives the year when each of these beers were introduced and lots of them have apparently been around for ages. I musn't have been looking! Even the local Murcia brewer, Estrella de Levante, has a beer called Punta Este on their website though there's no description of it, just a photo. Amstel Extra is for the bloke with strong emotions (really, that's how the blog translates) whilst Amstel Oro has the ingredients to be pretentious but prefers to be careful (and I thought education jargon was rubbish). Again, it seems that Amstel Oro, Amstel Gold, was introduced in 1956 so it's nearly as old as me.

And, alongside these bottles with different labels and differently coloured beer inside there are now, reasonably frequently, some local beers brewed in somebody's shed - artisan or craft beers. It's true that the outlet for most of them seems to be in the Mediaeval Markets and other street fairs but some bars do have them. Strangely one of the Spaniards who disliked English Bitter was also my drinking partner for some wheat beer and a pale ale tried over the summer at a Mediaeval Market in Teruel. He said he preferred proper, "industrial," beer.

One of the bodegas that Maggie uses for her wine tours, Casa de la Ermita, now does beer too under the name of Yakka. The last time I visited I tried their IPA. It wasn't that great to be honest but it was a nice change. I'm pretty sure that Yakka was actually started here in Pinoso, in the satellite village of Ubeda, because I tried their stout one cold November evening a couple of years ago at the Mediaeval Fair in Santa Catalina. A beer I sometimes drank when I lived in Cartagena, Icue, still looks to be alive and well too.

Who knows, give it another twenty years or so and it may be dead easy to get something other than industrially produced lager in Spanish bars.