Manly Pursuits – Jonny Goodall’s Last Drop

Rotting tarantulas with the hairs dropping off the legs into the wine… this is clearly not a drink for girls

WORMS IN tequila are for wimps.  Real men these days prefer scorpions in their vodka.  Not only are they satisfyingly more crunchy, they’re also aphrodisiacs and their higher shock factor raises the macho bar even higher. Worms? They’re for the birds.

Todd Dalton, a man after my own heart, understands the importance of showing-off which is why he travels the world sourcing all sorts of "exotic" food and drink for his company, Edible.

 He’s recently returned from Cambodia where he sampled stir-fried tarantulas with chilli and garlic – rather like soft-shell crabs, now that you ask.  His company sells a tantalising range of nibbles from BBQ flavour worm crisps and tinned red ant eggs to smoked rattlesnake and giant hornet honey.

Not surprisingly, his finger buffets are very popular at stag nights.  Since mankind first swaggered out of the primordial soup announcing "mine’s a large one", ritualized drinking has been a conspicuously macho pursuit.

We all know from our own experiences that too much whisky makes us want to drop our trousers and punch someone, and that downing yards of ale usually ends up with a damn good radishing, don’t we?

Hardened drinkers like the late Ernest Hemingway, the late Ollie Reed, the late Keith Moon and the delayed George Best fuelled their habits with mostly beer and spirits, while Keith Richards has single-handedly secured the reputation for Jack Daniels and Coke as rock ‘n’ roll mouthwash.

Anyone who’s ever tried to look hard clutching a flute of pink fizz, on the other hand, will know that wine drinking and rampant testosterone are not natural partners.

Wine, we are told, is a civilizing drink and, conveniently, the perfect accompaniment for food.  It’s just not great session material.  What’s more, it’s got "terroir", emphasising the influence of the patch of dirt where the grapes were grown.

Hardened beer and spirit drinkers might want to kick some of this precious dirt right back in the faces of smug wine drinkers, but I urge them to look within themselves and think again. It would be a safer, happier world if we could all find our inner wine drinker.

Now, I’m not suggesting you rush out and grab yourself a bottle of Château la Fleur de Gay and a waiter’s friend.

Personally, I draw the line at lychee and rose-petal scented Gewürztraminer that smells like a tart’s window box. 

If you do fancy a glass of white wine and you’re worried about your masculinity you could always try a pungent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc smelling of sweaty armpits, or maybe a Pouilly-Fumé which, despite its silly name, inspires manly tasting notes like "gunflint", "smoke" and "rotten cabbage".

But if you’re just not ready for white wines yet, it’s safer to stick to reds.  No one will hold it against you.  So look out for punchy Aussie Shiraz, inky dark California Zinfandel or feral, tannic monsters from southwestern France where cousins have been known to marry.

A Spanish red with a picture of a bull on the label, maybe featuring the word cojones, is another fairly safe bet.  Also look out for tasting notes like "farmyard sex", "grunt", "sweaty saddles" and "leather underwear". Or maybe not.

We must return to the orient for wines at the top end of the macho Richter scale.  Todd Dalton’s scorpion vodka was in fact inspired by Chinese scorpion wine which he says is simply "not safe" to sell in the UK.

And in Cambodia he saw tarantula wine which contained "a black, rotting mass of tarantulas with the hairs dropping off their legs into the wine".  This is clearly not a drink for girls. And it would seem that rice wine can embody the last bastion of maleness in Vietnam.

Here, Todd visited a restaurant called Snake Village where groups of men take part in a deeply disturbing drinking ritual to boost their strength and testosterone.

They slit a cobra’s throat and drain the blood into a glass of rice wine.  Then they put the snake’s still beating heart into another glass of rice wine, and pour its bile into a third glass before drinking the glasses in this order.

If these oriental shenanigans are not for you, there are plenty of willy-waving wine rituals which are perfectly acceptable in western cultures. 

At auction you could buy a case of 1982 Le Pin with cash; at a tasting you could try aiming your wine at the spittoon from a distance of at least five metres; or in a restaurant you could order particularly obscure wines in an unfeasibly loud voice.

But please remember that most macho drinking rituals end in tears, so I urge all of you to get in touch with your soft, peachy Viognier side for a fully rounded drinking experience.

Weasel words Now even teetotallers can look well ‘ard thanks to a couple of new additions to the Edible range from Vietnam. 

There’s weasel-masticated coffee where the beans have been chewed by a weasel and then regurgitated to make "a very rich, thick, black coffee"; and there’s civet coffee where the beans have passed through a civet’s entire digestive tract and out the other end to make "a very, very fine coffee with absolutely no aftertaste".

I can hear them in Starbucks already: "I’ll have a tall, skinny, no-fun weasel. To go."