So fill up your glasses with brandy and wine

Soundtrack – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJt4y4fH938
This apocalyptic isolation is fast driving me feral. I stalk about the kitchen, gnawing at a piece of bread, pouring myself red wine, refrigerated by the winter air.
I had been much less acquainted with alcohol when I arrived here, my party days long behind me, and whilst I was socially drinking again, a year of abstinence had ended any dependency I had on the drink.
I had seen at the London eco village and Westminster peace camp the true power of alcohol. It was not merely an evil perpetrated against the individual, infecting people with alcoholism, causing embarrassing behaviour and morning-after regrets. Alcohol’s power is much more prolific than that.
I watched as many times her corrupting fingers served to cause huge rifts within my community. At the peace camp any cohesion or even prolonged discussion was made impossible by the presence of alcohol and the effects it wielded on those who imbibed it.
It is not only colonised populations that have been controlled and over-powered by the state-sanctioned drug of choice. Where ever there is heavy alcohol use, community (aside from that based around the imbibing of liquor) becomes a non-entity.
It has not always been so.
I collect cherries on the first week of June, nervously teetering on the step-ladder. What a mouse I was – now I clamber unconcerned through windows, on wind buffeted scaffolding, over rocky outcrops. The Alchemist laughs at me and orders me to climb further, to over-stretch toward just-out-of-grasp crimson bounty.
With the baskets full and the tree almost bare, he strides off to his workshop – for tonight we make Aqua vitae – the water of life.
This alcohol, distilled from fruits using steam, the Alchemist tells me, has replenishing properties for both the material and spiritual form. It is not to be drunken casually and to be seen more as a medicinal tincture than a form of social lubricant. It is, however, drunk at any time of the day and I admit to occasionally having a sip or two from the communal vessel we supped from, at hours before nine in the morning. I felt no negative effects, no lethargy or dehydration or altered perception. In fact I would say it rather helped my labours on the building site and sent a feeling of warm strength extending out through every cell in my body.
The distillation process is slow taking many hours; my understanding is limited, but as I recall the fruits, being contained within a huge dome covered copper pan, are heated from underneath. The pan must reach a certain temperature and remain stable at that temperature for alcohol to be produced. Vapour from this pan travels down a pipe, to a coiled condensation tube, and then the sanctified liquor drip-drips into a vessel. Not all of the produce is fit for consumption. The liquid that first emerges is very high in methanol, if I understand correctly, and of no pleasure or benefit to drink; of course this is not wasted, but set to one side, in order to later make skin creams and medicinal balms. Several grades of grappa are produced, the smoothest and cleanest being known as the heart, and this is held to be the most beneficial liquid to drink. And that is about all I learned of the process, due as usual to my limited Italian.
Whilst the grappa distilled, I made cherry jam and cordial, and once finished we enjoyed the fruits of our labours together and with gratitude to nature’s cornucopia. I walked in the moonlight to the cherry tree and placed a slice of bread and jam, and a nip of grappa at her roots.
It was the first of many brews made during my time here and the only occasion that they were drunk without due respect or temperance was during a visit by some English friends, who were left to their own devices when we had all gone to bed.
In the morning the Alchemist looked in disbelief at the empty jar – I pulled a face to illustrate my discontent at his grappa being drunk. ‘Ma non e grappa’ he said eyes wide. It was the methylated spirits.
And were my country-folk in anyway adversely effected by this nasty brew? Why by all accounts their hangovers were less savage than a night drinking the liquor we are succoured on in Blighty.