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Sipping the Spirit of the North


"SKÅL!," WE CRIED, and no sooner had I set down my thimble-sized glass than a colossal Swede slapped me on the back and seamlessly refilled it. Then we began again, lilting through a new melody, my bleary eyes struggling with the foreign text spelled out phonetically before me.

This is how I whiled away one long summer night at a wedding reception on the Baltic coast of Sweden: hearing toasts, crooning local drinking songs and draining a profusion of little nips bottles of something called snaps (which is pronounced...