'Gin ginha'

MACAU -- Sweet as sweet can be. Swabeng-swabe as the drinking masters in the neighborhood sari-sari store back home are wont to blurt at the first sip of any wine or liquor alien to their pedestrian tastes.
The sherry wine of Portugal though transcends wining social classes, finding unanimity in judgment – superior – with even the most discriminating connoisseurs. Dom Pedro Alagos, at least, whom I know to have had a wide range of taste in wines, liquors, beers, down to tuba, basi and lambanog.
So teetotaler me – alcohol made me bloat and red all over so I avoided it like the plague – just have to take a sip of it – gin ginha (pronounced jin-jinya), it is called – if only to know and learn by taste what the buzz around it was all about. Hence I raised my glass with a toast to Dom Antonio Coelho, master chef of his eponymous restaurant along Ruo do Negosciantes.
Yeah, sweet as sweet can be this gin ginha, straight from an oak barrel. Smelled so good, tasted even better. So smooth to the throat, so pleasant to the tongue, that one sip deserved another, and another, and another, until my glass ran dry.
Yeah, I was ready and raring for my second glass when allergens took hold of my being – starting with a warm glow on the cheeks, on to hot flashes on the nape, down the chest, the arms, the hands, the legs, the feet. The loins getting a higher concentration, if not degree, of the heat. Then the throbbing between the ears, and the woozy feeling. Oh God, please don’t make me throw up before all these people.
Direct blasts of cold air from the van’s air conditioner were of little relief. Cold water splashes before dinner just intensified the heat.
Bottle after bottle of cold mineral water gulped down to dilute the alcohol in the gut. Ay, no gusto me. No buono appetito – as my obese Chavacano friend would always holler in his fractured Iberian lengua before meals: The gastronomic delight of cod fish, prawns, leg of lamb and suckling piglet not enough to even just whet the appetite.
A bottle of sparkling water perhaps? So suggested Dom Antonio Peralta of Miramar Restaurant.
Why not? I would have taken anything, even my own urine, if anybody suggested it as a cure to my alcohol malady.
Why not, indeed! Sparkling water worked fine and fast. Just one bottle was enough to bring back my old bubbly but un-toxified self. So I had a fill of the really delectable Portuguese meal.
So what can you say of gin ginha? Asked Senhor Joao Novikoff Sales, PR executive of the Macau Government Tourist Office, who served as our able and affable tour mentor. No tormentor, notwithstanding the homonym there.
Gin ginha? Ah, a woman is gin ginha. Beautiful, sweet and sensuous. Most appealing to the senses. But packing a wallop, aye, a kick in the loins to every male.
Gin ginha is most deservingly addressed as “Her Hotness.”
So on that night of June 3, 2010 in a Portuguese restaurant by the praia in Coloane, a new term entered the Pampanga media’s lexicon – gin ginha.
And for the duration of our Macau stay, gin ginha was the call, if not the order, of the day.