Category Archives: Spirits

Last night was Share our Strength’s Taste of the Nation NYC 2009 event, a walk-around tasting to fight childhood hunger.  It was held in the cavernous Roseland Ballroom and featured over 50 top restaurants as well as plenty of alcohol. 

Lots of heavy hitters from the city bar scene were there hawking specialty cocktails.  My favorite was the Talbott Leaf, which was personally served to me by Jim Meehan of PDT.

The name comes from the Talbott Tavern, an 18th century public house in Bardstown, KY.

2 oz. Woodford Reserve Bourbon
.75 oz. fresh lemon juice
.5 oz. green Chartreuse (French liqueur)
.5 oz. strawberry preserves
.25 oz. Cynar (Italian bitter)
4 mint leaves

Add mint and lemon juice to a mixing glass.  Muddle, then add the rest of the ingredients.  Add ice, shake, strain into chilled serving vessel and garnish with mint.

Granted, I love bourbon, but this cocktail was really well-balanced; a touch of sweetness from the strawberries, nice smokiness from the bourbon and some herbal undertones from the liqueur and the bitters.  I’m also a nerd who reads Jim’s monthly column in the Sommelier Journal, so I was tickled to see him do his thing.

Call it cachaça (ka-SHAH-sa) if you’re talking about the most popular distilled alcoholic beverage in Brazil or the key ingredient in the killer summer cocktail caipirinha (kie-pur-YEEN-yah). Most rums are made with molasses, while cachaça is made with fermented sugarcane juice.

Technically, cachaça is a brandy in the aguardente family – a strong alcoholic beverage between 29-60% alcohol obtained by fermenting and then distilling a sweetened must (vegetables, fruit, grain or cane). Aguardente translates to “firewater” or “burning water”, but fear not, there will be some refreshing cocktails at the end of this post.

The production of cachaça began soon after the introduction of sugarcane into Brazil, around 1550. It’s hard to say whether the fermentation of the sugarcane was by accident or was the work of a thirsty spirit.

It’s similar to rum in the sense that you can find both unaged (white/clear) and aged (gold from the barrel aging) versions. Look for notes of fresh sugarcane, flowers, citrus and perhaps some vegetal notes like cucumber or celery in an unaged cachaça; an aged one might also give you oak, toast, vanilla or sweet baking spices.

Classic Caipirinha
2 oz. cachaça
1 tsp. sugar
1 lime, cut in chunks
ice

muddle lime with sugar in a rocks glass, fill with ice, pour in cachaça and garnish with lime wedge

A fun way to mix up this drink is to add fruit. My favorite is strawberry, but you could also try mango, pineapple or passionfruit. If you wanted to be fancy, you could infuse the cachaça with your fruit/vegetable/herb of choice.

You can also find this version at L’Ecole.

Going Green
2 oz. cachaça
1 oz. simple syrup
1 oz. lemon juice
2 pieces green bell pepper (each about the size of a quarter)
5 basil leaves
1 sugar cube
3 shakes salt

combine pepper, basil, sugar and salt in sturdy glass and muddle. add ice, cachaça, lemon juice and simple syrup and shake vigorously. do not strain. pour into a rocks glass, top with a splash of soda and garnish with a basil leaf.

Saúde!

Even though it’s not looking like a great spring weather weekend, there’s no reason not to enjoy a tasty spring cocktail.

With less than half the alcohol, Aperol might seem like Campari’s teetotaling cousin, but it has a charm all its own. Aperol is in the bitters family, just like Fernet Branca, Cinzano or Dubonnet. It’s sweet with a bite, with notes of bitter orange and rhubarb. Aperol’s secret recipe of fruits, vegetables, herbs and roots dates back to 1919. The original recipe was developed by the Barbieri family in the Veneto region of Italy and it is now produced by the Campari company. You can enjoy it on the rocks, with sparkling water, as part of a wine spritzer or in one of the cocktails below.

Aperol Spritz
2 oz. Aperol
2 oz. Moscato d’Asti (sweet, low alcohol wine from northern Italy)
1 oz. orange juice
combine these ingredients with ice/shake/strain
pour into a rocks glass with ice and top with a splash of soda and garnish with an orange wheel

Spring Spritz
1.5 oz. bourbon
1 oz. Aperol
1 lime wedge
1 orange wedge
combine these ingredients with ice/shake/strain
pour into a rocks glass with ice and top with splash of 7-Up and garnish with an orange wheel

The first cocktail is close to a traditional spritz, but uses a dessert wine instead of a dry white or Prosecco. Moscato d’Asti is easy to find, inexpensive, effervescent and its sweetness plays nicely against the bitter orange character of the Aperol. The second cocktail isn’t technically a spritz since it contains no wine, but it’s still bright, refreshing and well-balanced because of the sweetness of the bourbon. Cheers, or as the Italians might say, cin cin!

One day it’s 50 degrees and raining and 3 days later it’s 80 and sunny. What’s happening with spring this year?

But fear not – let me introduce springtime in a bottle – Rothman & Winter Crème de Violette.

Flowers to drink? Well, you’ve tried pine berries and walnuts, so what do you have to lose?

Violets are fairly common in the culinary world. When newly opened, flowers in the Viola family can be used in stuffings for poultry or fish or to decorate salads. Soufflés, creams, cakes, chocolates and other desserts can be flavored with them, too. Don’t forget about Choward’s violet mints. Another option is to sautée the young leaves and treat them like a leafy vegetable. But, why would you want a vegetable when you could have booze?

Again we travel to Austria, where Queen Charlotte and March violets are carefully macerated with grape brandy and cane sugar. The photo above may not do it justice, but this liqueur is electric purple! It smells like the perfume of a lady (one your mother would approve of).

Historically, this type of liqueur has been used in Champagne cocktails as well as the Aviation (gin, lemon and Maraschino) and the Blue Moon (gin and lemon), but this is what I suggest:

Violette Femme
*2 oz. gin (try Hayman’s Old Tom – round, deep flavor)
*1 oz. Rothman & Winter Crème de Violette
*1/2 oz. Yellow Chartreuse (milder and sweeter than the green)
*1/2 oz. lemon juice
*1/2 oz. agave nectar (fairly easy to find, try Whole Foods – a little more intense than simple syrup, so you need less)
*combine all ingredients and shake with ice, strain, serve up and garnish with candied violets (you can find them at Dean & DeLuca)

You can find the Crème de Violette here or enjoy the cocktail at brunch on Saturdays and Sundays here.

We’ve moved from floor cleaner to Waldorf salad. Almost edible.

The word walnut stems from an Old English word meaning “foreign nut”. It got this name because it was introduced to us from Gaul (historical name from Roman times to describe Western Europe – now the area of France and Belgium) and Italy. The previous Latin name for the walnut was nux gallica.

So now I introduce to you Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur. There are some pretty easy recipes to make walnut liqueur at home (often referred to as Nocino), but I can guarantee you this one is tastier. Another family affair, the Purkharts pick fresh green walnuts each summer and let them sit in grape brandy for months. For the last 4 weeks, they add in a top-secret variety of spices and alpine botanicals (no corn syrup or vanilla extract here).

This version is rich, aromatic, well-balanced with a smooth finish, and of course, it’s nutty. Esentially, a tastier way to get your omega-3 fatty acids and for you ladies to reduce your breast cancer risk.

Here’s a cocktail to try:

Mixed Nuts (I gave it this name because sherry has a distinct almond aroma and flavor)
*2 oz. Oloroso Sherry (try Lustau – easy to find, inexpensive)
*1.5 oz. Nux Alpina Walnut Liqueur
*3/4 oz. Aperol (aperitif produced by Campari company with notes of bitter orange and rhubarb)
*1/2 oz. simple syrup (this is easy to make at home -use equal parts sugar and water – i.e. 1 cup sugar dissolved in 1 cup water)
*4 dashes orange bitters (Regan’s)
*juice of 1/2 lemon
*dash of salt (almost always a good idea in any cocktail – makes the flavors pop)
*combine all ingredients in shaker with ice, strain over ice and serve in rocks glass
*garnish with orange wheel

You can find the Nux Alpina here or the cocktail here.

Pine liqueur – really? This one is to drink and not to spruce up the flooring.

Don’t be afraid, be thirsty.

You may be familiar with Retsina, a resinated wine that is extremely common in Greece. It’s made just like any other white wine, except for small pieces of Aleppo pine resin are added to the must (fermenting wine) and left there until the finished wine is removed. Major production areas are in central Greece, close to Athens and the grapes used most often are Savatiano, Rhoditis, Assyrtiko.

Resinated wines can be traced back to the days of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. They used to keep their wines in porous, earthenware vessels and eventually learned to coat the inside with resin so the wine would keep better. This eventually morphed into adding the resin directly to the wine. Many people came to enjoy the taste of resin, so it became not only a preservative, but also a flavoring agent. Even ‘Pliny the Elder’ suggests adding resin to fermenting must (Natural History 14.124).

Today, resins have several uses in wine-making: surfacing the inside of wine vats, surfacing floors in wineries and bottling halls (resin is more resistant than concrete to acids in wine), adding flexibility to bungs for wooden barrels, stabilizing pigments in red wine. For you science nerds, resins (natural or man-made) are long chains of simpler molecules that are capable of polymerizing.

Now for the task at hand – a pine liqueur worth drinking and what to do with it. Pictured here is the Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur. Generations of mountaineers have learned from Josef Hofer how to harvest the Arolla stone pine in the Austrian Alps. You may have expected the Zirbenz to be green, but the natural red color comes from the fruit of the pine. Hofer began his family distillery in 1797.

So, how does it taste? Well, yes, it’s piney, but it’s also sweet and floral – like a prettier, more nuanced Fernet Branca. The producers recommend enjoying it apres ski, but this is what I suggest (I call it the Stone Fox):

Stone Fox
*2 oz dark rum (try Goslings)
*1 oz Stone Pine Liqueur
*1/4 oz simple syrup
*1/4 oz lemon juice
*juice from 2 pieces of orange
*4 dashes orange bitters (try Regan’s)
*dash salt
*combine all ingredients in shaker with ice / strain / serve
*serve up and garnish with orange twist

Click here to find the Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur. If you don’t feel up to making this at home, come enjoy one at the bar at L’Ecole.