An interesting piece on the story of hooch comes to us by way of Arts & Letters Daily — my intellectual savior — and New York Magazine in the form a review of the new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, by Iain Gately. Although the reviewer didn’t much care for the book’s style, he nevertheless lauded it for being chock full on obscure information — which if you’re anything like me is the whole reason you buy books at all.

The fun facts include:

• Egyptian wine connoisseurs rated their varietals using the word nfr, meaning good. A wine could be rated from one to three  nfr’s: “nfr nfr nfr.” We don’t anticipate trading in our system of spades for nfr’s, but it may one day come in handy, perhaps in the afterlife.
• The Greeks drank wine mixed with water, spices, and honey — and drank it constantly. No wonder Alexander came to rule the known world.
• The Aztecs drank fermented tree sap, but the legal drinking age was 52 — except on one day every four years when they would celebrate New Years, and everyone, including little children, were compelled to get drunk.
• The Anglo-Saxon word for drunk is beordruncen.
• Although Muslims banned alcohol, Arabs nevertheless gave it its name: al-koh’l.
• A single phylloxera bug can produce 25.6 billion descendants within eight months.
• Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. Sadly, by 2004, the country was down to one for every 529.
• The Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine trade.”