There comes a moment at any given tête-à-tête, life event or run-of-the-mill pub crawl when somebody, maybe you, feels the need to address the occasion with a few spontaneous yet fitting—perhaps even wise and witty—remarks, aided and abetted by a goblet of booze. Depending on the occasion and the mood of the moment, the words may be thoughtful, or sardonic, or lusty, or poignant; the important thing is to commemorate this instant in a ceremonial way, whether it’s with a flute of Taittinger or a shot of Old Crow. You feel the need to make a toast.
The liquor, of course, has a lot to do with it. Grape and grain have a way of loosening the tongue and enhancing one’s love of humanity, especially if one or more of those humans are gathered around you and in an equally convivial mood. And if they happen to be a long-lost friend, the love of your life—or freshly married, birthed or victorious in battle—several more toasts are probably in the offing.
The origins of toasting are lost in the mists of time, but we do know that the ancient Greeks lifted their goblets to the gods when seeking favor. Poisoning for power and profit was also popular back then, so at festive gatherings the thoughtful host would sip from his wine decanter in front of his guests, whereupon the guests would lift their glasses for filling and, most probably, an exchange of pleasantries. (Ulysses in fact toasts Achilles’ health in Homer’s Odyssey.) The Romans picked up the habit, even at one point passing a law that everybody had to toast the health of Caesar Augustus at every meal. The rambunctious Attila the Hun also enjoyed toasting between invasions; at one elaborate banquet, reports Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he led three rounds of toasts per course.
Nobody called them “toasts” for another dozen centuries, however. The wines of ancient Rome were on the bitter side, so toasted breadcrumbs were usually added to soak up the excess acid. The practice evolved through the Dark Ages, with spiced toast rounds eventually taking over from the crumbs. (“Go, fetch me a quart of sack,” says Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, “and put a toast in ’t.”) By the Renaissance, verbing had taken hold and the toast in the glass had given a name to the now-popular ritual of raising glass, proclaiming devotion and tossing back.
Despite successful attempts to ban toasting in Germany, France and colonial Massachusetts as the work of “pagans, infidels and heretics,” the practice endured, and in 1791 the first known book on the subject was published—The Royal Toast Master: Containing Many Thousands of the Best Toasts Old and New, to Give Brilliancy to Mirth and Make the Joys of the Glass Supremely Agreeable by one J. Roach. “A Toast or Sentiment very frequently excites good humor and revives languid conversation to cool the heat of resentment and blunt the edge of animosity,” wrote Roach. “A well-applied Toast is acknowledged, universally, to soothe the flame of acrimony, when season and reason oft used their efforts to no purpose.”
So true. This mashup of oration, camaraderie, good spirits and spontaneous poetic combustion abides to this day as a unique celebration of moods and moments worth remembering. Even littérateurs like Richard Brinsley Sheridan have gotten into the act:
Here’s to the charmer whose dimples we prize; Now to the maid who has none, sir: Here’s to the girl with a pair of blue eyes, And here’s to the nymph with but one, sir.
Meanwhile, in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the ebullient Tholomyès proposes “a toast to mirth; be merry! Let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy in the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere!”
Across the pond in Sonoma, the more pragmatic Jack London toasted, “A health to the man on the trail tonight; may his grub hold out; may his dogs keep their legs; may his matches never misfire,” while Mark Twain offered “an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty: ‘When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend.’”
Others have opted for the all-encompassing toast, even the usually disagreeable Macbeth (“I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table”), while Rudyard Kipling went large: “Here’s to us that are here, to you that are there, and the rest of us everywhere.” And who can forget Tiny Tim’s “God bless us everyone”?
Our history is galvanized with illuminating toasts, like this one from the Roaring Twenties: “Here’s to Prohibition,/The devil take it!/They’ve stolen our wine,/So now we make it.” Or this relic of the Revolutionary War: “To the enemies of our country! May they have cobweb breeches, a porcupine saddle, a hard-trotting horse, and an eternal journey.” J. Robert Oppenheimer punched up Lao-Tzu and the Bible for his own toast, “To the confusion of our enemies,” to which Joseph Conrad replied, in typically sullen mood (albeit half a century earlier): “To the destruction of what is.”
The movies have delivered some nifty toasts, the most famous of which has to be Humphrey Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid” to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, but Ernest Thesiger’s totally thespianic delivery of “To a new world of gods and monsters!” in Bride of Frankenstein is another pinnacle. So too Simon Callow’s benediction in Four Weddings and a Funeral: “A toast before we go into battle. True love. In whatever shape or form it may come. May we all in our dotage be proud to say, ‘I was adored once too.’” But then there’s Groucho: “I drink to your charm, your beauty and your brains—which gives you a rough idea of how hard up I am for a drink.”
Around the world
Back around the time Falstaff and Macbeth were toasting in iambic pentameter despite the best efforts of Louis XIV and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an Austrian missionary visiting Italy on his way home from China shared his impressions of that faraway land with an eager public. Of particular interest was the custom of Mandarin diners to raise a cup before every course, chant “zin zin” in unison and gulp down the cup’s contents. Before long Italian toasters were chanting “cin cin,” then Spaniards “chin chin,” Catalans “xin xin,” Portuguese “tchim tchim” and the French “tchin tchin”—not only a fun and festive cut-to-the-chase but an onomatopoeical homage to the sound of clinking glassware. (The early Christians started that tradition as a way of mimicking church bells and scaring away the devil.)
Today’s Chinese celebrants have forsaken “zin zin” for “gan bei,” a variation on “bottoms up” roughly translated as “drain your cup dry.” Like “cin cin,” this mini toast has spread to neighboring countries, from Japan (“kanpai”) to Korea (“geonbae”) to the Philippines (“kampay”). (One differential: In Korea the cup isn’t refilled till it’s empty, but in Japan the cup is constantly refilled so it’s never empty.) Vietnam’s favorite drinking chant, meanwhile, is “môt, hai, ba, dô!,” or “one, two, three, take in!,” shouted enthusiastically in unison before downing (most popularly) beer.
The Russians have their own pithy all-occasion pre-shot chant (“na zdorovye,” aka “to health”), but the classic Russian toast takes the form of an anecdote or epigram with a kicker, for instance: “My great-grandfather says, ‘I have a wish to buy a house, but I have no means; I have the means to buy a goat, but I have no wish.’ So let us drink to having all our wishes match our means!” At informal get-togethers, however, the toasts are as simple as they are perennial: Round 1—“To our gathering”; Round 2—“Refill quickly”; Round 3—”Here we go again.”
The Georgians take the art of toasting to a whole new level. The star of any supra (feast) is the toastmaster, or tamada. Nominated by the host and elected by the guests, the ideal tamada is quick-witted, well-spoken and adept at managing the flow and rhythm not only of the toasts and their subject matter but between-toasts songs and dances as well. In addition, the tamada has to tailor the toasts to the mood of the evening, pace the flow of alcohol, make sure all of the guests have their say and somehow not get roaring drunk despite joining in every toast. The toasts themselves take on a competitive air, as the guests try to outdo one another in eloquence, wit and spirit.
Scandinavians also have designated toastmasters, a tradition dating back to the Viking days, when a skäl (bowl) was filled with firewater and passed around as toasts were made to acts of bravery, the spoils of battle and the fallen dead. Nowadays, depending on where you are, you’ll raise a glass of chilled aquavit to the person across from you, look them in the eye, say “skäl” (in Denmark), “skál” (in Iceland), “skool” (in Finland) or “skål” (in Norway and Sweden), shoot the works and resume the eye-to-eye before putting down the glass.
The Jewish tradition of toasting dates back 2,000 years and is even referenced in the Talmud, where it countenances the raising of a glass “to wine and life to the mouths of the rabbis.” The classic Jewish toast, though, is “l’chaim” (“to life”), familiar to anyone versed in Fiddler on the Roof—“Life has a way of confusing us,/Blessing and bruising us./Drink, l’chaim, to life!” Indeed, more often than not this is a toast of hope and prayer rather than celebration, uttered in defiance or strength during times of trouble.
Other examples of the one-word toast include border-crossing variations on Russia’s “na zdorovye” (e.g., Bulgaria’s “nazdrave,” “Poland’s “nazdrowie,” Ukraine’s “nazdorovya”) as well as Germany’s “prost”/Holland’s “proost”/Switzerland’s “proscht” (“be well”) and the ubiquitous Empire-encompassing “cheers,” but most have derived from the Latin word for health, “salus”: Spain’s “salud,” Italy’s “salute” and Catalan’s “salut” as well as France’s “santé,” Romania’s “sanitate” and, way up north, the Isle of Man’s “slaynt,” Scotland’s “slàinte” and Ireland’s “sláinte.” The Emerald Isle, however, is more celebrated for its long-form toasts, of which this is the most famous:
May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
May rains fall soft upon your fields
And may you be in heaven a half-hour
Before the devil knows you’re dead!
Open seas and white weddings
There are only a few occasions nowadays when toasting assumes the protocol of the Russian/Georgian/Viking model. One is when officers of the Royal Navy begin their noon meal
with a toast to their sovereign followed by a toast tailored to the day of the week (Monday: our ships; Tuesday: our sailors; Wednesday: ourselves; Thursday: “a bloody war or sickly season” when promotions are more forthcoming; Friday: a willing foe and the “sea room” to enter battle; Saturday: our families; Sunday: absent friends). Toasts are made in a seated position (a tribute to the generally low ceilings of wardrooms) and are never made with water, which would doom the toasted to a watery grave.
The other occasion when toasting becomes something more than a desultory “cheers” or even a “to high winds and mermaids!” is the wedding reception. The etiquette is positively regimental. The father of the bride kicks things off with a sincere toast (“To the most beautiful bride since your mom 30 years ago”) followed by the best man’s funny toast (“To this very emotional day—even the cake is in tiers”) and the maid of honor’s funny toast (“To the two most important people here today—the bartenders”) and finally the groom’s thankful toast (a laundry list too tedious to itemize). Here, as ever, don’t stand or drink till the toast is done; don’t lower your glass during the toast, no matter how long-winded it is; and never ever toast with an empty glass (toasting with water or a soft drink is perfectly kosher). Make sure, however, to offer a rousing “hear hear!,” clink the devil away and guzzle like a Falstaff.
Then make a toast of your own. Whether you’re in a hotel ballroom, a Georgian vineyard or the corner saloon, it’s a moment worth celebrating.
