So now with December, that very Hannibal Lecter of a month, sinking its carefully-filed teeth into our throats, we can decently ask this question, says Kevin Myers
What is it about Christmas that causes people to inflict on their friends and loved ones the liquid atrocity known as "mulled wine"? Is it a usually repressed hatred of the human race which, goaded by the egregious jollity of the season, erupts with a vitriolic and homicidal savagery, causing normally honourable people to attempt to poison all they know? Whatever its cause, the alchemists responsible are usually grotesquely proud of their confections and, after forcing one glass on you, gaze with a dementedly cretinous grin written across their imbecilic faces, like a mother who married late in life and is now watching her tubby son, Cuthbert, win the under-fives' egg-and-spoon race. Worse, this authorial delight has a compellingly ruthless edge to it, such as the mother might exhibit towards the egg-and-spoon race stewards if they suggested that, before little Cuthbert collected his gold medal, he should take a drugs test. Thus, the wine-muller's eye glints dangerously as you hold the glass without actually drinking it. It is a test of wills. And the muller always wins.
So you put the concoction merely to your lips, but that you drink none makes no difference. Mulled wine can penetrate armour, and mere human flesh is as wet tissue paper. So it cuts through your chin directly onto your teeth, to which it becomes instantly electroplated in a red malignant fur, before swiftly adhering to all the sensitive surfaces of your inner jaws.
It doesn't matter how little mulled wine actually enters your mouth, nor how briefly you allow the glass to rest against your chin, the effect is always the same. And you know from previous Christmases that not even a fire hose power-jetting hydrochloric acid around your tongue and molars will dislodge the layer of mull now fixed there.
Mull is actually quite a good word for such encrusted nightsoil. The OED lists various meanings for "mull". One is finely ground rubbish in suspension. Another is a cold bleak headland. Another, a heifer. Another is muslin used in bookbinding. Another, a muddle.
Another, mud. Another, "to stupefy". Another, "to fumble". The last, to treat leather with chemicals.
And that about sums it up: there isn't a single good thing to say about the word "mull". Moreover, in addition to the ground rubbish in suspension, with fox-droppings from the Mull of Kintyre, with some heifer-manure and bookbinder's glue, topped off with acidified leather, mulled wine also tastes of creosote, paraffin, turpentine and a burning oil-well, with the strong possibility of what might well be crocodile's rectum, if you could be sure what crocodile's rectum tastes like. You can, actually: just like mulled wine.
Now you know that your tastebuds have been ruined for the next six months, if not for ever. You know that industrial cleaners are booked out to late spring by people vainly trying to remove encrusted mull from their mouths. You know that Christmas dinner is certainly going to taste like the Tet offensive, a compost heap and the final foot or so of an alligator's alimentary canal. So you have every justification for beheading your assailant with a broadsword, and slaying his wife and loved ones.
Yet what do you? Why, you expose your red-stained teeth in what is supposed to be a smile, though it resembles the bloodied grimace of a vampire-cow, and, through the ruined wasteland of mucous tissue that is your mouth, moo how utterly delicious the concoction is. Around you are your fellow guests, cross-eyed in agony, their teeth glued together as a consequence of their host's liquid hospitality, semaphoring "let's get the fuq out of here" signs to their spouses - the ones that are not dead, of course.
"Excellent!" chortles your host, and fills your glass back to the brim, then fixing you with a look of murderously benign expectancy, like Saddam Hussein asking a courtier whether he approves of the Iraqi leader's golf-stroke. Every molecule of your being, every follicle on your scalp, every tooth in your mouth, every cell in your brain screams: Brain him before it is too late!
No good. You raise the glass back to your mouth, and once again the warm flavours of Berlin-in-1945, mustard gas and reptilian back-passage, all marinaded in tannin-rich Bolivian red wine, fill your entire being. Tears trickle down your cheeks. In the green mist which seems to fill the room, figures flounder, choking, guttering and dying, like those unhappy fellows from one of Wilfred Owen's less cheery poems.
You try to still your host's hospitality with the declaration, "No more thanks, I'm driving", but instead you hear this mechanical voice from the region of your mouth clearly enunciating the utterly poisonous fiction: "What delicious mulled wine. Any chance of the recipe?" There is a rattling noise from the floor: the dying gasps of your wife. Now you really are driving. Your host prattles off the ingredients with a thoroughly depraved self-satisfaction: wine, cloves, cinnamon, lemon, sugar, and not a mention of the vinegar, the Third Battle of Ypres or the crocodile-colon currently coating your mouth.
Worst of all is the knowledge that the same fate awaits you the next day, and the next, and the next, until Christmas is finally over. Which is, of course, why the season is called Yule, abbreviated from, "You'll be drinking that filth called mulled wine for an entire bloody fortnight."