Ambriel Sparkling

Very excited to be at Vinexpo Paris for the first time this year. Pop over and see us - we'd love to pop a cork with you!

DAY 24: Advent fact – THE BAN ON CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND It turns out Oliver Cromwell did not ban Christmas after all. The puritans worried about Christmas: either because it was too pagan, or because it was too catholic and wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. They frowned upon the general jollity, banqueting, feasting and wassailing that Christmas involved. It just wasn’t religious enough. English Puritans wanted Christmas reformed. Whereas Scottish Puritans wanted it banned. John Knox, who founded the Kirk of Scotland, in 1561 published ‘The First Book of Discipline’. It decried Christmas as a holy day invented by papists and demanded it be ‘utterly abolished’. Court records show punishments for those marking ;Yule day’: forcing shopkeepers to open their shops , and sanctioning carol singers, dancer games players. In England, Elizabeth I (a protestant) allowed Christmas to survive. In 1567, James VI became King of Scotland and – despite (or perhaps because of) being raised by Calvinists – he revoked the ban on Christmas. When he also became King of England in 1603 Christmas was officially party time! His son Charles I also embraced Christmas with masques. Ben Johnson’s plays had 'Captain Christmas' born in Pope‘s Head Alley (ie of Catholic origin) but “as good a protestant as any“. In the end, Christmas was cancelled in England by the Puritan Parliament because of three things: the Civil War, the 1643 treaty with the Scottish parliament and the fact that in 1644 Christmas was on a Wednesday. The Civil War put the Puritans in Power. The Treaty between the English and Scottish Parliament agreed further religious reformation. In 1644 the Puritans legislated to mandate the last Wednesday in each month as a solemn fasting and penance day. This became problematic when Christmas fell on a Wednesday. They felt they couldn’t celebrate it. Christmas (and other festivals) were banned. As Christmas became a working day, Parliament sat on 25th December. For 12 years soldiers ensured the opening of shops and the closure of churches. Puritans hadn’t really thought this through though:  the taverns stayed open so people drank and celebrated. The people defiantly held on to Christmas. In 1647 they mutinied in Norwich. In London, when an order was given to remove the illegal pagan greenery hung on the city walls, the crowd refused to go and get ladders. In Canterbury the mob smashed shops that were open on Christmas Day and (unusually for a mob) demanded extra church services. At the Restoration in 1660 the king returned his throne and 'Old Christmas' was released from jail. Christmas was safe. By then in Scotland the focus had moved to Hogmanay (New Year) and Christmas did not even become a bank holiday there again until the 1950s.

DAY 23: Advent facts – CRACKERS Christmas crackers appeared in about 1845-1850 when  Tom Smith, a London sweet maker, copied French 'bon bon' sweets (almonds wrapped in pretty paper). Even though he added a small motto or riddle, the sweets failed miserably to sell in London. He fretted over how to boost sales. Legend has it that when sitting in front of his fire, a log cracked sending out sparks, inspiring him to make his sweets open with a ‘Crack!’ when pulled apart. Spoiler alert: he actually just bought the recipe for cracker bangs from Brocks fireworks. So in 1861 he launched 'Bangs of Expectation'! Crackers were nicknamed 'cosaques': as the bangs were reminiscent of  'Cossack' riding around firing guns into the air. The sugar almond was replaced by a small toy and paper crowns were added later – inspired by the crowns on French epiphany cakes. Themed crackers include bachelors and spinsters (with gifts like false teeth and wedding rings) Suffragette crackers, war hero crackers, Coronation crackers and even Charlie Chaplain crackers. The King still has special crackers made for Christmas today. Not to boast, but so does our family (I make them – because my jokes are the worst!)

DAY 21: Advent facts - MISTLETOE An illicit Christmas kiss under the mistletoe was the thrilling highlight of the Victorian Christmas, but where did this all come from? There are many claims for the ancient pagan practices of mistletoe, not all of it solidly based in evidence. Mistletoe is spread by birds. They eat the mistletoe berries and excrete them in willow, apple and oak trees so the seeds are stuck to the bark and can root into the tree. In Anglo-Saxon ‘mistle’ means ‘dung’ and ‘tang’ means ‘branch’. It is, somewhat unromantically ‘shit on a stick’. Pliny described the Druids as harvesting magical mistletoe with golden scythes, but this is probably rubbish. It takes a lot of gold to make a scythe which would make an agricultural implement far too expensive. Better to pop it in some show-off jewellery you can wear all the time. Also, gold is very soft so cannot cut through the though mistletoe. It may well have been used as magical by the Druids though: it retains its leaves even in the dead of winter, and was believed to ward away evil spirits, which is why it is often hung in doorways. Mistletoe is seen as potent. In Norse mythology Loki tricked Höder to throw a mistletoe arrow at the - otherwise invulnerable – Baldur killing him. He had to be reinvigorated  by the other gods. So don't mess with the mistletoe. Its racy associations come from the white berries being strongly associated with semen and therefore fertility. It was this raunchy past that reputedly had it banned from some churches, but not all. York Minster used to hold a special 'Mistletoe Service' to pardon the wrongdoers of York. We’ve been bringing mistletoe into our houses since at least the mid-seventeenth century. Probably because it is green and so an encouraging sign of life in the bleakness of winter. We’ve been kissing under it since Georgian times around the 1720s, although mistletoe also featured in the Tudor ‘kissing bough’. The illustration of kissing under the mistletoe in ‘A Christmas Carol’ in 1843 popularised the custom... So much so, that we’ve had to ban mistletoe from office parties.

DAY 21: Advent fact – THE WINTER SOLSTICE Today, 21st December, is the shortest day of the year. At 10.02 GMT today Winter starts. The Sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.4 degrees – so the North Pole is tilted farthest away from the Sun. This means that today has the fewest hours of sunlight of the year. It is the Winter solstice with the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Many cultures celebrated the Winter solstice and focused on the power of the sun. Norsemen saw the sun as a wheel that changed the seasons. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, the Druids are reputed to have given mistletoe, the Celts burnt great fires to compensate for the lack of sun as it was believed to stand still for 12 days. Some people believe that Christmas was chosen as the 25th December as it coincided with the Romans celebration of Sol Invictus – the birthday of the unconquered sun. So the winter solstice and Christmas may be connected, or may be not. Either way, from tomorrow we’ll get more hours of daylight.

DAY 20: Advent fact – HAVE WE GOT THE DATE OF CHRISTMAS WRONG? Probably. PROBABLY THE WRONG YEAR Not 0AD or 1AD Given that our current calendar system counts from the Nativity, you would expect Christmas to be in 0AD or 1AD. But it isn't. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus (or ’Little Dennis’) created a calendar where every year was either Anno Domini (AD) ('the year of Our Lord') for after the birth of Jesus or Before Christ (BC) for the years before. Unfortunately he started counting from the wrong year (4 years later than they should have done) with odd results, such as ... Herod We know as a matter of historical fact when Herod died. It was 4BC. That’s right. This means that the Nativity followed by the Massacre of the Innocents was purportedly ordered by Herod even though he had already been dead for 4 years. This is unlikely to be correct. PROBABLY THE WRONG MONTH The Gospels are a bit light on facts in the Nativity story. Only two of them address it at all. - Luke tells us that there were shepherds in the fields. - Matthew tells us that Mary and Joseph went on a trip to Bethlehem. What scant Biblical clues there are suggests that December is wrong. (1) Sheep Most shepherds in Bethlehem kept their sheep outside from March to November. Afterwards they over-wintered them inside. So if there were sheep on the hills, it was unlikely to be the end of December. We have just become accustomed to the idea of a cold Chirstmas: ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ insists that there was ‘snow on snow, snow on snow’ and that ‘earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone’, but you have to admit, these are not sheep-friendly conditions. (2) Trip to Bethlehem Also, unless there was an emergency,  in those days people did not travel in the winter. You certainly wouldn’t organise a Census for that time of the year, and Caesar Augustus would not have mobilised the population to be counted in the winter. He’d have waited until Spring. So it is very unlikely that Joseph and Mary would have headed off the Bethlehem in December and been caught out by going into labour while there. PROBABLY NOT 25TH Evidence of Christmas being celebrated on 25th December has no basis in the Bible. It is first mentioned in 336AD – so three centuries after the first Christmas. Some people insist that, as the Romans celebrated the Solstice on 25 December, Christians simply adopted the same date. Maybe. But is it clear that plumping for 25th December certainly doesn't follow from a careful analysis of the likely date of birth. The exact date of Christmas might well be wrong, but it is still worth celebrating!

DAY 19: Advent fact - CAROLS   Carols are now Christmas songs, often sung in Church and often based on the Nativity story. But they didn’t start out that way. Carols were dance tunes. In Old French ‘carole’ means ‘dance’. In the 12th Century England had a Plantagenet King, Henry II, shared with bits of France. His court brought carols from France to England. Any good dance tune would do. Often travelling minstrels would repurpose existing folk tunes with different lyrics. Sometimes the lyrics often had no Biblical basis at all: how else could you explain ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’? Carols were sung and danced at any time of the year. We had May carols and harvest carols. After a while, the church got in on the act. Their carols told of the nativity, definitely had NO dancing, and may not have been easily understood by everyone as they were in latin. What’s more, the priest wanted to control the singers so they were moved from the minstrel’s gallery at the back of the church to near altar, alongside the priest, so he could keep them under control. So the people took to the streets. Literally. They sang and danced their carols on the village green. By the 1640s the Puritans wanted to silence the singing, as being too pagan (or alternatively too Popish), so the people went underground. Illicit sing songs would happen at the pub. They still do in Sussex. Much to the puritans’ frustration, the combination of singing and drinking meant things got a little rowdy.   Two hundred years later, the Victorians embraced carol singing warmly - if demurely - bringing along a little handbell to keep themselves in tune. They created many new carols: ‘Good King Wencleslas’, ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’, and ‘We three Kings’ – by putting new lyrics to old tunes. Then, they would sing house to house, now carol singers are mostly in shopping centres. Not many people dance to carols now, but we could change that …..  

DAY 18: Advent fact - CHRISTMAS PUNCH Ever since Thomas Colley, a merchant with the East India Company, was urged to ‘drink punch by no allowance’ in 1632, punch has been a party drink - especially at Christmas. No-one is absolutely sure why it is called punch. ‘Punch’ (as an anglicized form of Hindi) is said to mean five, referring to its five ingredients: water, alcohol, fruit juice, sugar and spice. This explanation is slightly undermined by the original recipe only having four ingredients (eau de vie, rose water, lemons and sugar) - so perhaps it is named after the on-board drinks barrel instead – the puncheon? The first proper punch recipe is found in Hannah Wooley’s ‘The Queen-like Closet’ of 1670: ‘‘Take one Quart of Claret Wine, half a pint of Brandy, and a little Nutmeg grated, a little sugar, and the juice of a Limon, and so drink it.’ Toast, raisins, cinnamon, nuts, ambergris and ‘other ingredients’ could also be added. ‘ Ambergris comes from a Sperm whale. They eat a lot of cephalopods (squid and cuttlefish) but can’t digest the beaks and pens. These make their way through the whale and are compacted and surrounded by a fatty secretion so it doesn't hurt he whale;s insides. It emerges from the whale – and no-one is entirely sure from which end (either is pretty disgusting) – as a grey/brown rock that floats on the sea, often for years. You can see how it got its name – grey amber. Its initial odour is foul, but modifies over time and tide to become merely musky. It is highly prized in the perfume industry, is fiercely expensive and is devoured greedily as an aphrodisiac. In the 17th century Brits were used to weak beer and cider. When they discovered punch they thought they could guzzled it in the same way. So much so that spirits had to be more heavily taxed to restrain them. Portion control had arrived. By the 18th the ‘Classic’ punch recipe was as easy as 1,2,3,4: -1 of sour (lemon, lime, or orange juice) - 2 of sweet (sugar) - 3 of strong (brandy, rum, arrack or wine) - 4 of weak (water, tea, milk or eggs). As people experimented with new liqueurs and wines, punch was adapted and become less acidic and sweeter. As part of the Christmas ritual it was often ‘the cup of kindness’ sung about in - and indeed with - ‘Auld Lang Syne’. In the early 19th century these punches could even be warmed to ward off the winter chill. In Dicken’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ the brandy was set alight and the punch was ‘flamed’. The spectacle was as important as the drink. Bompas & Parr has the record for the largest punchbowl in the world – it was a room holding 4,000 litres called ‘The Architectural Punchbowl’. Now THAT’S spectacular!

DAY 17: Advent fact - MULLED WINE Mulled wine is a Christmas staple in Northern Europe. Try and walk through a Christmas market without being offered a glass of this Yule fuel. It is spiced red wine, spices with raisins and citrus fruits, and drunk warm. It is related to our old friend - the wassail cup. Spiced wine has been around since Roman times: it was called Ypocras and the spices and toast disguised the taste of imperfect wines. In England it has featured i medieval cookbooks since 1390. 'Mulling' wine simply means heating it with spices. Even the famous Mrs Beeton perfected a recipe of mulled wine: ‘To every pint of wine allow 1 large cupful of water, sugar and spice to taste.’ Her wines were usually port or claret and the spices were cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and mace, with lots of sugar and strips of crisp dry toast or biscuits. Modern recipes often have oranges and lemons, ginger, cardamom and star anise, but there are limitless variations so you often find honey and pepper added to ward off winter colds. There are regional variations. Germans drink Gluhwein: literally glowing wine because the wine is warmed and glows – not because it has that affect on your nose. Nordics drink Gløgg – but don’t glug too much as it is strengthened with aquavit, and almonds are added (although I don’t blame the almonds). The Dutch drink Bishopswein flavoured with oranges while waiting for SinterKlaus. When it is chilly, you might like something warm and warming. Something to mull over.

DAY 16: Advent fact - O Come, All Ye Faithful ‘O Come all ye Faithful’ (‘Adeste Fideles’) is a much-loved carol, but is it also a call to violent rebellion? Some people believe it is. They say it was a Jacobite call to arms to rebel in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim to the English throne. The ‘Faithful’ are said to be Catholics: that is, those faithful to the old, pre-Reformation religion. They would have preferred a Catholic Stuart king in the direct line of succession, instead of leapfrogging to the the protestant, Hanoverian George I. Originally the carol was written in latin, so much depends on the translation. The phrase that has caused the most excitement is ‘Regem Angleorum’. This is usually translated as ‘King of Angels’, but could also be translated as ‘King of the English’. Now you see the rallying cry: ‘O Come all ye faithful ....... Come and behold Him Born the King of Angels/English’ After the Jacobite rebellion was crushed in 1745, John Francis Wade (who first printed ‘O Come all you faithful’ ) fled to France. He certainly printed the carol, but the jury is out as to whether or not he wrote it. Wade definitely had Jacobite sympathies and included a lot of pro-Jacobite imagery in his books, some of it in secret code. He also originally wanted the title of the carol to be ‘Regem Angelorum’. People have also noticed that often Roman Catholic liturgical books would position ‘O Come all you faithful’ next to the prayers for the Stuart king in exile. Is this enough to prove the carol intends to incite rebellion? Or are we reading too much into this? Personally, I'm unconvinced that this was originally intended as a song to overthrow the monarchy. First, there is no real proof that Wade even wrote ‘Adeste Fideles’. He may have just copied it from someone else. If so, it could hardly be jacobite political propaganda. Also, the original lyrics are verbatim words from the Bible or the Nicene Creed – so it is difficult to conclude that it is anything other than the usual language of worship. Is there any mischief here? I don't know if it was the original intention, but since then there is a significant number of experts who have interpreted it as a rallying cry for a Jacobite rebellion, maybe ....