A Drink With Edwin Winckler, American Social Scientist, Professor, and Author

Tracy Wang, Senior Editor | Jul 29, 2018 5:00 pm | Add a comment | 2579 reads

A Drink With is a regular column in which we ask Beijing personalities to tell us about their drinking habits and beverage preferences. This issue, we talk to Edwin Winckler, an American social scientist, author of several books, emeritus at Columbia, and professor at Tsinghua, who has also in his spare time experienced Beijing via a plethora of drinks.

First, tell us a bit about yourself.
I am an American social scientist who has been studying China for more than 50 years. My responsibility has been to explain Chinese politics to Americans. However, in the 2010s, I started spending more time in China, trying also to explain American politics to Chinese students. I first came to Beijing in 1979 escorting a group of American urban planners. Like many people, I love Beijing’s old hutongs. Now I always stay in the same old courtyard hotel off Beiluogu Xiang.

I walk a lot here and find lots of interesting places. Nevertheless, it took the Lonely Planet guide to Beijing to direct me to Great Leap Brewing, then only at 6 Doujiao Hutong. I was immediately enchanted by the Chinese courtyard setting and intrigued by the Chinese ingredients in some of the beers.

What’s your favorite drink, and has it changed over time?
Currently, I particularly enjoy affordable effervescent white wines from the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal. I also enjoy numerous liquors like gin, especially before dinner. My favorites are either classic London or experimental American gins. In winter, however, nothing beats a smoky Scotch. After dinner, I often sip a little brandy or bourbon or rye. I now use vodka only to soak up interesting flavors, such as Chinese tea or Sichuan pepper, imitating Great Leap Brewing.

Among beers, as an overseas student in Europe in the early 1960s, I enjoyed French blond beers and British dark stouts. Now, of course, American craft beer is good too. But I have become tired of increasingly over-hopped India Pale Ales, so I now prefer good versions of other types.

What’s your golden rule of drinking?
I believe in drinking whatever the occasion calls for: a quiet cocktail to relax before dinner, several glasses of wine with dinner, and several beers with friends. Such social rituals probably have a good effect on the body, regardless of the chemical content of the drinks.

For me, living alone, the “occasion” is mostly dinner: what wine to drink? Some classic pairings really do improve both the food and the wine. But now sometimes I eat food and drink wine mostly separately, in order to taste each as clearly as possible.

As a scholar, I always have to worry about whether my head will be clear enough the next day to think. Now one also has to worry about medical research that recommends fewer and fewer drinks a day, by now only about one!

Has your time in China changed any of your drinking habits?
Well, unlike many foreigners, I’ve found I actually like baijiu. Moreover, I now understand that drinking too much of it together with new acquaintances is a good way to establish new social relationships. I particularly enjoy occasions when Chinese hosts, after warning me that baijiu may be too strong for a foreigner, gradually discover that I can drink more of it than they can!

What’s your most outrageous drinking experience?
In the mid-1960s while I was a graduate student at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts I had a girlfriend out in the suburbs near Wellesley. Her family was in the grocery business and started an elegant restaurant in an old mill overlooking a lovely waterfall.

Unfortunately, to finance the restaurant, her family borrowed money from the local mafia, who then stole things from the restaurant like fine silverware and fine wines. I tried to monitor the wine cellar, which the mafia definitely did not like.

So one night at the bar they put a “mickey” in my drink (drugs to knock me out). Driving back to Cambridge, I could barely see where I was going, blinded by the bright lights of other cars. I was lucky to make it back without an accident. After that, I stopped monitoring the wine cellar.

What’s your idea of a good night out?
I particularly enjoy multi-course tasting menus in which an adventurous chef presents a sequence of his best dishes and creatively pairs them with a sequence of beverages, be it wines, beers, spirits, whatever. Of course, this experience is best when eaten with a charming woman or a few foodie friends. But I don’t mind eating alone so that I can give full attention to the food and drink.