National Post (National Edition)
The case of the peculiar martini
TORONTO LAWYER’S CURIOUS EVENING WITH RECALLED BOTTLE OF BOMBAY GIN
WHY IS THIS HITTING ME SO HARD? THIS IS NOT MAKING ANY SENSE.
On Monday evening, Robin Basu got home before his wife. There was a hockey game on: Penguins versus Capitals, Game 3 of the NHL’s Eastern Conference semifinals, the one where Sidney Crosby got concussed. There was a Toronto Raptors game, too, and he remembers watching some of that match.
It had been a frantic day for the 51-year-old Basu, who works as Crown counsel in the Ontario attorney general’s office in downtown Toronto.
“I had no beer in the fridge,” he said. But in his freezer, there was a blue bottle of Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin. He set about fixing himself a Gibson martini the way an old mentor taught him to make it when he was a young lawyer in the 1990s. His mentor, the late attorney and judge Paul Lamek, had been adamant: a Gibson must be made with “Bombay blue” that is “very, very cold.”
Basu found a martini glass in the cupboard and filled it with about two ounces of the icy cold gin. He dribbled in no more than a thimbleful of vermouth and rummaged through the fridge for a few pearl onions. “I always keep those on stock.”
Basu did not stir the drink. “None of that. No ice. That’s what makes it so strong,” he said. Glass in hand, he crossed from the kitchen to a sofa in the living room of his house in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. He settled in, only half-paying attention to the hockey as he disposed of the martini “reasonably quickly.” His wife came home and started heating up leftovers.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I could probably use another one before dinner.’” His second drink was not as generous as the first, he insists, a “half-martini.”
His teenage daughter was doing her homework. His wife went upstairs to change. He finished his second drink before they both sat down to dinner at the island in the kitchen. “I actually don’t even remember what it was,” he said. “Lamb roast, I think? Not lamb, sorry. Veal roast.”
As he ate, the liquor grabbed him. He was suddenly woozy. “Why is this hitting me so hard?” he wondered. “This is not making any sense.
“I had enough sleep the night before, it’s not like I’m exhausted,” he thought. “I’m really, really, really old if I can’t handle my liquor.”
He looked at his wife. “This is strong stuff,” he said. As it turned out, his wife had sampled the gin herself days previous.
“Yeah,” she told him. “I had one of these and boy, I felt the same way.”
After dinner, Basu returned to his long, curving sofa in front of the television.
“I just lay there and the room was spinning,” he said. “Why is the room spinning? I know I only had the one big one and one moderate one. Room spinning? That’s just weird. And then basically, I was out of it. I don’t even know. I think I slept, I just kind of conked out.”
When he awoke — an hour later, he guessed — the Washington Capitals were winning 2-0 and the commentators were talking about “the hit” on Crosby.
Feeling better, he and his daughter watched the end of the game together, then he went to bed.
Basu didn’t think much of the experience until he heard a radio report while driving Wednesday about a nationwide recall of 1.14-litre Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin. A mishap at a U.K. bottling plant had caused a batch of the bottles to be filled with gin that had 77 per cent alcohol content rather than the advertised 40 per cent. Though only a “few” cases in the batch of 6,000 bottles shipped across seven provinces are expected to contain 77 per cent alcohol, all have been recalled out of an “abundance of caution,” said Bacardi Ltd., which owns Bombay Sapphire.
The affected batch is recognizable by its “lot” code, printed on each bottle: L16304W.
Basu checked the bottle in his freezer. It was 1.14 litres, he said. He didn’t check if the lot code matched the recall, but he was certain.
Basu put the gin in a grocery bag and, as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had directed, marched it to his neighbourhood LCBO, where he says he received a cash refund.
“I would have to dilute it to drink it, then it would change the flavours. It just wouldn’t be the same.
“And say my daughter, she’s not supposed to, but she gets into it or her friends get into it. This is like 154 proof. No, no, no, no. It’s not a good product to have around the house.”