Ever since I visited New Orleans last summer, I’ve been inordinately fond of two particular bottles in my liquor cabinet: the rich, luscious Sazerac 6-year-old rye whiskey, and New Orleans’ homegrown absinthe substitute, Herbsaint.

There’s something about the younger Sazerac that is just so damn lovable; it’s not as crisp as many Pennsylvania-style ryes like Rittenhouse bonded or Michter’s U.S. 1, and it’s not as mellow and bourbon-like as ryes like Van Winkle Family Reserve. Instead, it’s smooth and round, with a distinct herbaceous dryness matched with tinges of peaches and brown sugar. This rye is downright bosomy.

Herbsaint, of course, started life in New Orleans in 1934 as a stand-in for the banned absinthe, and quickly became the top American-made absinthe substitute. Today, it’s made in Kentucky (by the same company that makes the Sazerac rye), and aficionados say current bottlings aren’t up to the complexity of classic Herbsaint from the ’40s, but it’s distinctive anise character — rougher and more robust than French relations like Pernod and Ricard — is still desirable in a lot of cocktails. (Want more info? Pick up the latest issue of Imbibe, which has an article I wrote about Herbsaint.)

Typically, these two ingredients can be found hobnobbing with a hearty dose of Peychaud’s and a touch of sugar in a Sazerac, a drink that is the natural home for both the Sazerac rye and the Herbsaint. But it’s a shame to only mix these made-for-each-other spirits in one drink; thankfully, there’s another New Orleans cocktail, a kissing cousin of the Sazerac, that uses these ingredients to great effect: the Cocktail a la Louisiane.
In Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em, from 1937, Stanley Clisby Arthur writes that this was the house cocktail at the Restaurant de la Louisiane, “one of the famous French restaurants in New Orleans, long the rendezvous of those who appreciate the best in Creole cuisine.” The cocktail uses the Sazerac’s base of rye, Herbsaint and Peychaud’s, then fleshes it out with sweet vermouth and throws cascading layers of complexity into the drink with a mighty measure of Benedictine, a venerable French herbal liqueur. This cocktail is on the sweet side, but not cloying, as you might expect from a cursory glance at the recipe.

Rich and voluptuous, with the flavor of decadence mixed with sin, the Cocktail a la Louisiane is a great reason to break out the rye and pastis. This has become my signature drink of autumn 2006.

Cocktail a la Louisiane

• 3/4 oz. rye whiskey (I like the Sazerac 6-year in this, but it also works well with other brands)
• 3/4 oz. Benedictine
• 3/4 oz. sweet vermouth
• 3 dashes Herbsaint (use another pastis, or better yet absinthe, if you don’t have Herbsaint on hand)
• 3 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Stir with cracked ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.

Tags: Drinks, Rye, Vermouth by Paul
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This week-or-so lapse in posting is brought to you by the good folks at Martini & Rossi who — having got wind of Jimmy’s proposal to focus on aperitifs for this round of Mixology Monday — kindly invited me to visit their vermouth factory in Italy, then sent me on to Noilly Prat’s facility in Marseillan just so I could have a well-balanced post.

Okay, that’s not what really happened, but I did actually spend part of last week in Turin, the birthplace of vermouth, where I had the pleasure of touring Martini & Rossi’s facilities and taking part in a tasting of assorted wines, essences and other ingredients that go into their rosso, bianco, rose (only available in Europe) and extra dry vermouths, before moving on to spend a couple of days in the small French resort town of Marseillan, where Noilly Prat vermouth has been made since the early 1800s. While I was there working on a story assignment, the timing of the trip so close to Jimmy’s aperitif event seemed too good to pass up.

For most North Americans, vermouth is an afterthought — few people have tasted it straight, usually out of some baseless fear that vermouth is a sort of nasty elixir that corrupts martinis. But in much of Europe vermouth is a part of daily life, consumed chilled or over ice as an aperitif, or as part of a simple cocktail in which it appears in a starring role, not just the walk-on it typically has in the U.S.

It’s a shame that vermouth has reached such a sorry state in the U.S. It was one of the earlier cocktail mixing ingredients, appearing in Jerry Thomas’ bar guide, among many other early tomes in the profession. And taken straight, vermouth — good, quality vermouth, well-chilled and well-cared for — is an enchanting beverage. Simply white wine flavored with bundles of different botanicals and fortified with a little neutral spirit (and sweetened, for the rosso and bianco, and colored with caramel, for the rosso), vermouth has an impeccable pedigree. Originally blended by such maitre d’licoristes, or “master drink-makers,” as Giuseppe Carpano and Alessandro Martini (the latter apprenticed at the same Turin bar as Gaspar Campari–the bar’s no longer there; I looked), vermouth was originally created as a way to take a mediocre wine and make it more palatable. Over time, the quality of the wine improved, and along with it, the quality of the vermouth. Today’s vermouths, when treated right, are of impeccable quality, blends of marjoram, cinnamon, chamomile, cloves, quinine, wormwood, and many other ingredients that add layers of spice and bitterness to the finished product. Sipped chilled before a meal or mixed in respectable measure in a cocktail, vermouth is the perfect aperitif.

To see what the Europeans are getting at, it’s a good idea to take a fresh approach to vermouth. Start with a new bottle, and keep it chilled. Vermouth is a flavored and fortified wine, so it’s perfectly acceptable to pour it neat into a wine glass or over ice in a rocks glass, and maybe garnish with a piece of lemon (for a dry or bianco) or orange (for rosso). If you find the sweetness of the rosso or bianco a bit cloying, try lightening the drink with a splash of club soda. (And as a fortified wine, vermouth also has a limited life span — after opening a bottle, keep it refrigerated and try to finish it off within a couple of months; dry vermouth is excellent as a cooking wine — try it when steaming mussels or making a white clam sauce — and this is a good way to use up old vermouth.)

Cocktails that put vermouth at center stage are memorable drinks. One of my favorites is the Red and White (aka the Duplex, the Half-and-Half and the Addington, depending on which cocktail manual you’re using) — easy to make, easy to like, and not so much alcohol that it knocks you off your stride while cooking dinner. My wife’s favorite aperitif cocktail is the Bamboo, another easily mixed drink that is made bone-dry by combining dry vermouth with a fino sherry. And to put a little jazz in it, try the Trilby, a vermouth-based cocktail with Cointreau and Peychaud’s for depth and attitude, with a float of Your Favorite Whiskey to put a snap in its sails.

Red and White

• 1 1/2 ounces dry vermouth (Noilly Prat is my house brand)
• 1 1/2 ounces rosso vermouth (Martini & Rossi or Cinzano, as the mood hits; you can also play around with Carpano Antica or Punt E Mes, for additional bitterness, or — go for broke — pick up some Vya)
• 1-2 dashes orange bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass (or pour into an ice-filled rocks glass), and garnish with a twist of lemon peel.

Bamboo

• 1 1/2 ounces dry vermouth
• 1 1/2 ounces dry, fino sherry
• 1-2 dashes orange bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a lemon twist.

Trilby

• 3 ounces dry vermouth
• 1 dash Cointreau
• 1 dash Peychaud’s bitters
• 1/2 ounce whisk(e)y (I like a blended Scotch for this, but Maker’s Mark also works well)

Stir the vermouth, Cointreau and bitters with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Float the whiskey on top, and garnish with a lemon twist.

This round of Mixology Monday is being hosted by Jimmy over at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour. Be sure to stop by and see what other folks are posting.

Next up: Mixology Monday V, hosted by Jonathan over at Jiggle the Handle, on July 17. Topic: Lemon.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Vermouth by Paul
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Building a home bar is an exercise in setting priorities. Spicy rye whiskey, decent mixing gin and a bottle of Cointreau? Right up there at the top of the list. Maraschino liqueur, Campari and Chartreuse? Maybe around level B, after all the basics are covered and you’re ready to explore a little bit. Dutch-style gin or Martinique rum? Wild cards - grab ‘em when you find ‘em, but you probably won’t use them that much, and putting a lot of energy into the search will only leave you frustrated (unless you live near Hi-Time Wine, Bev-Mo, Sam’s, Astor Place, or a very few other mondo liquor stores in the country. Lucky bastards.). Advocaat? A bargain bin or surprise-your-guests oddity; otherwise, save the space for a bottle of something more useful.

Until about a month ago, I placed Parfait Amour in the same neighborhood as Advocaat, Creme de Noyeaux and Baranjager. It’s an amusing, obscure liqueur, mentioned in plenty of old cocktail manuals, but almost entirely as a layer in a sticky-sweet pousse cafe. Purple in color and with a taste, as Ted Haigh writes in Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, “like the delicate combination of grape jelly beans and marshmallows,” Parfait Amour is a mixological curiosity, an unusual 19th-century violet, orange and vanilla liqueur that somehow made it’s way into 21st-century Washington State liquor stores (plenty of them, too — you’ll have to drive all over town to find a bottle of Punt E Mes, but Parfait Amour? It’s everywhere.)

Or it was until recently, anyway. That’s because a little over a month ago, the rows of pretty purple Marie Brizard bottles suddenly wound up with a bright orange tag on the shelf beneath them — CLOSEOUT. Evidently, someone at the state liquor board finally figured out that nobody was buying this stuff, and decided to drop the axe on the old Perfect Love. It’s days are numbered here in Washington; soon, that shelf space will be given over to Sour Guava Pucker, or Cabana Boy Rhubarb-flavored Rum, or some other ghastly product-of-the-month.

Faced with the demise of this liqueur (locally, anyway), realizing that this classic flavor I’d often sneered at would soon be denied me, I found myself, first, offended and dismayed that the product was being removed, and, inexplicably, with a strong desire to grab a bottle of this liqueur before it disappeared.

After putting it off until I was afraid I’d missed my chance, I finally picked up a bottle last week, and set to making the one non-pousse cafe-style drink I knew of offhand that called for Parfait Amour: the Jupiter Cocktail.

Jupiter Cocktail

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 3/4 ounce dry vermouth
• 1 teaspoon orange juice
• 1 teaspoon Parfait Amour

Shake with ice, and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Back to Vintage Spirits: Haigh credits Harry MacElhone with printing the first known recipe for the Jupiter in 1923. I found Doc’s description of the drink spot-on, mostly: it doesn’t have a very appealing color (kind of purply grey and hazy), but it does have a special something in the flavor. But to my taste, that special something was too vague - with a teaspoon each of the two modifiers, the Jupiter tasted like a classic dry martini with something indefinable dribbled into it. Not bad - actually pretty good - but still, it was a minor taste at the periphery of the drink.

I made a second version of the Jupiter that was more in line with my palate. I increased everything: ratcheted up the gin to 2 oz., the vermouth to 1 oz, and the OJ and PA to 1/2 ounce each (that’s about 3 teaspoons - I added it a teaspoon at a time, tasting as I went until I found an agreeable balance). This version, I found, kept the gin and vermouth flavor dominant, but the fruit and liqueur flavors became more than just a ghostly echo. Of course, I’ve only just started with the drink, so after a few more versions, I may find myself toning it back to Doc’s suggested recipe.

Was it worth the purchase? Maybe. Granted, when the state placed Parfait Amour on the dead-booze-walking list, it did wind up in the bargain bin. But now I’ve got a 750 ml bottle (shy 4 teaspoons) of grape candy-flavored liqueur taking up precious space in my crowded liquor cabinet (actually, it’s now in my liquor annex, on a shelf in the hall closet). I like the Jupiter, but I don’t know if I like it enough to work my way through the bottle. Pousse cafe, anyone?

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Vermouth by Paul
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Screw eBay.

Over the past few years, I’ve put together a modest library of drinks-related books, most of them out-of-print and many fairly old and somewhat rare. Apparently, I haven’t been alone; as I check out the usual places on eBay and other online sources for old books, I’ve seen prices rise exponentially, just in the few years I’ve been collecting.

Take David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, for example. Three years ago I was shocked by the $40-50 price tag I was finding for the book online; I eventually found a copy at Powells.com for $10, and snagged it immediately. Today? Check this out: as of this moment, a copy of the 1961 edition in good condition is running at $225, with two days left to bid. That’s downright depressing, for someone hoping to expand his collection.

You can at least find Embury; other vintage cocktail books are so rare that I can’t even recall finding them online, much less at a hyper-inflated price. Such is the case with Harry MacElhone’s Barflies and Cocktails, from 1927. Cocktail geeks with greater experience, timing and/or resources than I have wagged this volume temptiingly online and in press as it has, among other things, the first known printed recipe for the Pegu Club. But despite my sporadic searches, I have yet to see a copy for sale.

This drink apparently comes from that book, and it’s a cocktail I’ve been meaning to try ever since David Wondrich wrote it up in last fall’s edition of Drinks magazine. Wondrich notes that the author included a section of recipes contributed by regulars to Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, where Macelhone presided. Credit for this drink goes to a Philadelphian named Chuck Kerwood, apparently known as the “wild man of aviation.” Yeah, well, if you had a couple of these under your belt, you’d be pretty wild in the cockpit, too.

Burnt Fuselage

• 1 ounce VSOP Cognac
• 1 ounce Grand Marnier
• 1 ounce dry vermouth

Stir with ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass and twist a strip of lemon peel over the top.

Verdict? Nice….

Tags: Books, Brandy, Drinks, Vermouth by Paul
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It’s been a good week for cocktails in the media.

Today I received by e-mail an invitation to visit a website I’ve never seen before. Nothing unusual there–beyond the typical enticements to check out the online poker, the performance enhancers and “Me and mY reD-Hott grrrlfrindxxx,” there’s the occasional note, typically worded in a quick form-letter fashion, that reads, “love your site. link to my blog,” or “i like bars check out my bar stool site.” I’m sure nobody’s surprised by this.

But today, I received an e-mail from Lost Magazine, an online journal launched a mere six months ago, with an invitation to check out a new article on a “lost cocktail,” the El Presidente, by Wayne Curtis. As astute, longtime readers of this site (or chronically bored mouse-clicking addicts–you pick which category you fit into) may recall, El Presidente was one of the first cocktails I blogged about, way back in the dark ages of May 2005, and it remains in my list of top ten–check that, top five–personal favorite cocktails of all time. Furthermore, in my opinion, it ranks alongside the Police Gazette Cocktail as one of the most tragically forgotten, ignored and what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-people-that-you-haven’t-recognized-the-brilliance-of-this-yet drinks in the world of mixology.

I was intrigued.

Prepared to be disappointed–the internet is a bitter, bitter place–I followed the link, and found myself reading one of the best meditations on cocktails and the gradual slide of the art of bartending that I’ve read in recent memory.

Here’s the lede:

In the savage ecosystem of the cocktail lounge, newly invented mixed drinks generally appear from nowhere, compete fiercely for a time, and then disappear. Some fine concoctions claw their way to the top and remain there exceedingly pleased with themselves, like lions on the savannah. The whiskey old-fashioned, the Manhattan, and the mint-julep — all of which have been around for more than a century — are among the best examples of this. Meanwhile, many execrable drinks are chased into the swamps, where they die a slow and lingering death. This is as it should be. The world is not a lesser place because nobody remembers how to make a Harvey Wallbanger.

(Play along at home: read it here.)

Curtis goes on to chronicle the sad exceptions–the Jack Rose, the Bronx, the Ward Eight (which he calls the “Eighth Ward,” a new one on me)–fine drinks that have mostly succumbed to the metaphorical sands of time. The El Presidente is in this tragic fraternity, and Curtis travels to the drink’s birthplace, the time-warp city of Havana–where, in 1928, the drink was described as “the aristocrat of cocktails and is one preferred by the better class of Cuban”–to sample the drink as it should be made.

I’m with Curtis throughout this piece–how bartending changed from an art form focused on the creation of individual drinks, into a mass-production factory job–and how this change in the profession led to the sloppy manufacture, and eventual demise, of cocktails such as the El Presidente. Curtis also recommends trying one at home, and makes a point of advising against using Bacardi white rum–the original rum in the cocktail, sure, but a pale imitation of its former self–when mixing the drink.

A quibble, though: Curtis recommends Prichard’s rum, which I’ve never tried so I can’t judge; failing that he suggests an aged rum, even if it’s dark. In my experience–and believe me, I have some experience playing with these–darker rums make a flavorful El Presidente, but a good-quality white rum provides a better balance. Metusalem Platino works well, as does Flor de Cana white–though, to his credit, it’s an aged white rum. I’d also sidestep Curtis’ suggestion to use pomegranate molasses instead of mass-produced grenadine, and instead take the five minutes to mix a batch of homemade–I keep meaning to post a recipe, but if you go back to my original El Presidente post, I think I list it briefly in the comments section. Finally, his recipe calls for the ingredients to be stirred with ice for three or four minutes; really, unless you like your cocktail to be 3/4 water, 30 or 40 seconds should do the trick.

In the bio line it’s mentioned that Curtis has a book coming out in July, called And a Bottle of Rum: The History of the New World in 10 Cocktails. If the book is anything like this essay, I know what my summer reading list is starting to look like.

El Presidente

• 1 1/2 ounces decent white rum
• 3/4 ounce dry vermouth
• 3/4 ounce curacao
• dash grenadine

Stir with ice for 30-40 seconds; strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

Tags: Drinks, Rum, Vermouth by Paul
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