Cocktails are for Grown-Ups

I received a terrifying email from a colleague of mine in the Wine Media Guild this past weekend. Grub Street San Francisco, just this past Friday, reported on what it’s calling “a newish category of lite booze...‘vodka,’ ‘rum,’ and ‘tequila’ made from orange wine and agave wine.”

It continues: “The so-called advantage? These babies clock in under 24% alcohol, or 48 proof — the legal limit for a beverage served under a beer-and-wine license in California and a number of other states.”

Every week, I personally receive dozens of press releases about new fermented products, and the majority of them are pretty interesting: Specialty spirits, artisanally distilled concoctions, and the like. But once in a while, I’ll receive information about a product that would never pop into existence without the evil-genius work of some food and alcohol scientist with a will and a really bad idea. These low-alcohol concoctions seem to fall into the category of the latter.

My personal opinion is pretty straightforward: It’s a crime against nature and your liver (not to mention your poor, abused taste buds) to subject them to these lab-created abominations. Drink a grown-up cocktail, or order a Shirley Temple and get on with your meal.

Hemingway, Sinatra, and every other respectable devotee of the cocktail are all spinning in their final resting places as a result.

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Sherry: A Primer and Cocktail Recipes

Camper English, creator of the Alcademics blog and one of the country’s most respected cocktail and spirits writers (and one of the journalists on the trip to Jerez I took last September), recently published a fantastic story on Sherry in The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Not only does the article provide an excellent primer on the region itself as well as the various styles of Sherry that come from there, but he also includes a number of cocktail recipes that take advantage of both the range of Sherry’s flavors and their uncanny ability to lift any cocktail they appear in to a higher level of complexity than it otherwise would have achieved. Click here for the full article.

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The Importance of Aroma

In matters of taste, there’s nothing more important than the sense of smell. Wine lovers have known this forever: The lip of a good wine glass that’s narrower than the widest part of the bowl, the swirling, the sniffing—it’s all done in order to enhance a wine’s smell, and, therefore, its flavor.

These days, the same attention is being paid to spirits, too—at least in the right hands. We’re not talking about bathtub-sized, quintuple-distilled vodka martinis here, but cocktails that are crafted in such a way that their multiple layers of character all have the opportunity to shine through. Which, in the arithmetic of all things imbibed—be it wine or spirits or tea or coffee—equals more, and better, flavor.

I recently sat down with Tom Pittakas, the Beverage Director at Alison two, Chef Alison Barshak’s fantastic follow-up restaurant to her successful and wildly popular Alison at Blue Bell in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Tom is one of the most careful, considerate, knowledgeable beverage professionals I know, and during the course of our conversation, he told me about a new technique he’s using at the restaurant’s bar. And though this one is obviously for spirits, the underlying principle is the same as it is for wine: Aroma is key. Rather than try to describe it, though, I’ll let Tom show you himself.

After shooting, I tasted the cocktail, and was blown away by the careful interaction of flavors on my tongue and the persistent aroma that literally clung to the sides of the glass, enhancing the entire experience.

The lesson is simple: In wine and spirits, as in everything we drink, focusing on smell is one of the surest paths to enjoyment and pleasure.

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