She'll Drink to That

Our beloved Founding Fathers were pickled a good bit of the time, she points out. George Washington made whiskey. John Adams started his days with a large tankard of hard cider. And during the Constitutional Convention, she writes, the 55 delegates took a day off to party and they knocked back "54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new republic."

Researching the book was fun, partly because she's the kind of dogged historian who really checks things out. For instance, when she read that Queen Victoria used to drink a tumbler filled with half red wine and half Scotch, Holland felt obliged to try the horrendous cocktail.

"I was expecting to throw up," she says, "but it wasn't bad at all."

By now, the wineglasses are empty, so she fills them up. The wine is a delicious 2005 Barbera d'Alba, but Holland couldn't care less about that. She's not a wine snob, or even a connoisseur.

"There's a local restaurant where, when I show up, they get me a glass of merlot," she says, "and everybody keeps telling me that nobody is drinking merlot any more; everybody is drinking pinot noir. Well, frankly, darling, I'm not sure I could tell the difference."

The restaurant is Cate's in Purcellville. "It used to be a car dealership before it was a Dairy Queen and, frankly, everybody else there is drinking iced tea," she says, visibly appalled at the very idea. "I spent most of my adult life in Philadelphia, and in Pennsylvania a man would as soon go out in public wearing a tutu as drink iced tea. But these guys have tattoos and bulging muscles and the waitress keeps filling up their ice tea while I'm drinking my merlot."

Actually, she drinks mostly Scotch, she says, but she's not a snob about that, either.

"Everybody is horrified that I don't insist on a single malt and I don't have an opinion on Glenfiddich and all that," she says. "People want to impress me and they serve me Cutty Sark, which tastes like white wine to me. I like ice cubes in my Scotch, but apparently it's illegal to put ice cubes in a single malt. You are allowed to put in a teaspoon of water to bring out the nose."

Just for the record, how much hooch does the author of "The Joy of Drinking" knock back?

"The author of 'The Joy of Drinking' knocks back roughly a half-gallon of Scotch a week, year in and year out -- and enjoys excellent health," she says. "A couple glasses before dinner and one before bed. It seems to agree with me. And it's been going on for a long, long time."

It certainly hasn't curtailed her literary production. After a couple of decades in the advertising business in Philadelphia, she has banged out three children's books and a dozen adult books, including a history of dueling, a biography of Katharine Hepburn, a book of essays on American presidents, and a bestselling memoir, "When All the World Was Young," that won rave reviews when it was published in 2005.

"Writing is the only thing I was ever able to do, actually," she says. "I wrote my first novel when I was 5. I had to dictate it because I couldn't print all those words. I think it's still around here somewhere. My mother saved it. My mother was a writer, too, and there are more goddamn boxes of manuscripts around here than you can shake a stick at. The place needs a good fire."