By Michael Pakaluk
After Bill Clinton’s re-election, which he so lamented, Judge Bork wrote a celebrated essay on the martini (“How to Forget the Election”), in which he offered an excellent method for obtaining the best consolation available. In that same spirit, then, and seeking the consolations we need, I propose that we commemorate that illustrious judge and his estimable drink by declaring that, from now on, the “Fifth” of November—in accordance with the ordinary public meaning of the word—shall mean gin, and not the Gunpowder Plot nor the bonfires on which the English once burned the Pope in effigy.
The wise judge advised: “Just the right amount of alcohol taken at the right time will allow you… to see the humorous side of the United States having a banana-republic government, and to fall asleep congratulating yourself on having risen above despair.” Plus ça change.
He admitted no “alcoholic relativism.” There existed, he maintained, an objective truth about the best drink: “Just as there are spiritual truths, there are spirituous truths.” Although Bork was an originalist and wary of natural-law jurisprudence, here he reasoned like a Thomist, or nearly so: there is a natural law of liquors, and the martini is that law, distilled.
If the martini is objectively the best drink, its fortunes are a fair index of the health of at least one part of our culture. Here the judge would rejoice, were he with us; I suspect he does rejoice. “The terrible truth,” he wrote in 1996, “is that the martini was on the verge of extinction. A few years ago, no one under forty drank it.” He claimed a modest share in its resurgence. He had taught his clerks the ideal recipe, and they began ordering “Judge Bork martinis” in Washington bars. “This,” he confessed, “gave a somewhat false picture of life in my chambers.” (Note the ironic “somewhat.”)
Have his efforts borne fruit? Perhaps so. The margarita remains America’s favorite cocktail, yet it has lost ground. According to NielsenIQ, the number of drinkers aged 21–34 who order it regularly has fallen 28 percent in two years. Meanwhile, martini sales per bar rose 29 percent at the end of last year. In the world’s best bars, the dry martini now ranks fourth, behind only the margarita, the Negroni, and the Old Fashioned.
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions,” wrote Cicero in De Re Publica (III.33). “And it is not permitted to alter this law, nor to derogate from any part of it, nor can it be wholly repealed; neither the senate nor the people can free us from it… There will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future. One eternal and unchangeable law will be binding on all nations at all times. And there will be one master and ruler of us all—God, the author, promulgator, and enforcer of this law.”
And so it is with the law that is Bork’s ideal recipe. Despite an explosion of craft gins—and a greater availability of vermouths from France, Italy, and even Japan—the natural law of the martini, in its “genus,” remains the same, though it may be “specified” in different ways. Historical studies of the martini have not called it into question.
Yet here is a step Bork overlooked. He never articulated the ideal. He discarded and excluded, but did not say why. “A martini means gin.” Why does it mean gin? “The martini must be served without ice.” Melted ice dilutes it, to be sure, but why is that bad? And what is the proper proportion? “[Lowell] Edmunds says the ratio of gin to vermouth may range from 4:1 to 8:1.” But why?
The first readers of that essay loved it in part for its firmness of character, for its dogmatic defense of intuited high standards. But where do those standards come from? Remember: no “alcoholic relativism.”
As St. Thomas teaches, natural law is articulated through the understanding of an inclinatio grounded in nature. An Aristotelian might call it a type-ideal. We want, for example, to raise a child well to maturity—this child who is one flesh with its mother and father. Our own nature is designed for us to do so. Therefore we articulate the “natural law of marriage,” which governs and defends this ideal.
A clue may be found in Judge Bork’s apt claim that the martini is “a distinctively American invention, which Bernard DeVoto called the ‘supreme gift of the United States to world culture.’” The ideal toward which the martini points is the same one sought by Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or the Chrysler Building, or the opening bars of Appalachian Spring, or the colors of North by Northwest.
A martini “wants to be” something, Aristotle would say: bright and clear, sharp yet refined and subtle, with a complexity that must be discerned and is appreciated only after one has been initiated into the practice. I imagine it with notes of chocolate and licorice, proper to a juniper-forward gin, with shimmering layers of evanescence both sweet and saline. From the inclinatio toward this ideal, in one who possesses what Aristotle would recognize as a mature and properly habituated nature, almost all of Bork’s prescriptions follow.
Here I part from the judge. Historical research has inclined many discerning bartenders toward the 3:1 ratio, and even the fifty-fifty martini (50/50) has received attention. But in my experience, and in that of the cocktail masters I know, the best ratio is 5:1, with, in addition, a generous dash of vermouth and, curiously, a blend of at least two vermouths is always superior.
“This cocktail is not only the best means of restoring the tissues, as Bertie Wooster would say, but also the best means of recovering sanity and a sense of humor after the carnage of the… election.”
That is what the good judge prescribed.
About the Author
Michael Pakaluk, a scholar of Aristotle and an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business of The Catholic University of America, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Gibbons Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of the American Catholic Quarterly Review. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His most recent book, on natural law and civic friendship, Walk in the Good Way, will be published shortly by The Catholic University of America Press. You can follow him on Substack at Michael Pakaluk.