Peru and Chile, At It Again

If you ever thought the rivalry between the Pisco-producing nations was a lot of hype, attending the Tales of the Cocktail seminar "Pisco Wars: Peru vs. Chile Since 1633," disabused you of that notion. Unlike many Tales panels, the event featured a minimum of brand tub-thumping, and actually featured some healthy debate, and not a little veiled animosity. Of the two parties, Charles de Bournet, representing Chile, was the more conciliatory. By the end of the talk, he was extending an olive branch to Peru, saying history was not as important as agreeing that both countries made fine Piscos, but of a different sort. Historian Guillermo Toro-Lira, arguing Peru's side, was having not of it. "Our stance is that there is only one Pisco," he said. When moderator Steve Olson challenged anyone to tell the different between Chilean Pisco (in which water can be added) and Peruvian Pisco (where water is forbidden) in a blind taste test, Toro-Lira said, "I'll take that challenge."

Here's my write-up for the New York Times:

Do Not Resuscitate

The cocktail world can get pretty sanctimonious about the Mixed-Drink Beforetimes. So it's always pleasure for the ears when some dearly held conventional truths are torn down for shibboleths that they are. During the recent Manhattan Cocktail Classic, the most talked-about panel was called "Do Not Resuscitate." It was packed with some of the most unassailable authorities in the cocktail demi-monde, and they dared to make such blasphemous statements as the Aviation isn't as good a cocktail as we think, and the Brooklyn is, when it comes down to it, not as tasty as a Manhattan.

Shortly after the seminar wrapped up, I met a bartender and told him which cocktails the panelists had trashed. With the mention of each drink, he got more and more agitated. At that reaction, I knew the panel had done its job.

I wrote up the seminar for the Times. Here it is:

Cocktails for the History Books, Not the Bar 

By ROBERT SIMONSON 

A collection of cocktail world figures lined up Saturday at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, the annual New York drinks convention, to shoot down some sacred cows. 

Many a pre-Prohibition libation has been glorified in recent years as the cocktail demimonde began to resurrect and lionize the drinks of Days Gone By. Not every drink deserved the honor. That was a point of the panelists gathered at the Andaz 5th Avenue hotel for “Do Not Resuscitate,” a seminar sponsored by Pierre Ferrand Cognac. The speakers included the legendary barman Dale DeGroff; the owner of the Pegu Club, Audrey Saunders; the mixed-drink historian David Wondrich; the owner of Fort Defiance, St. John Frizell; the tequila and mezcal authority Steve Olson; and the wandering cocktail generalists Robert Hess, Philip Duff and Angus Winchester. 

A few of the darlings of the cocktail renaissance took a heavy drubbing from the panel. Among them was the Brooklyn cocktail. Entirely obscure a decade ago, this mix of rye, dry vermouth, maraschino liqueur and Amer Picon (a French amaro), can now be found on bar menus across the United States. “This is not a good drink,” Mr. Frizell said with unhesitating definitiveness. As the owner of a Brooklyn bar, Mr. Frizell has seen his share of Brooklyn cocktails. Most of said concoctions bend over backwards to make up for the fact that you can no longer buy one of the drink’s key ingredients, Amer Picon, in America. “Drinking a Brooklyn makes you think, ‘Why am I not drinking a Manhattan?’ — a drink for which the ingredients are readily available,” he said. 

Mr. Degroff took aim at the aviation, a cocktail made of gin, lemon juice and maraschino liqueur from the early 20th century. Rediscovered in the early 2000s, it was one of the earliest and most celebrated reclamation projects of the mixologist community. “It was a darling of the Internet,” Mr. DeGroff said. But, “It tastes like hand soap.” And, if you use the blue-hued creme de violette called for in some recipes, “it’s more like hand soap.” 

The Papa Doble — a famous creation credited to Ernest Hemingway that contains much rum, some lime juice and almost no sweetener — also received no love from Mr. DeGroff. “Why should we have our drinking habits dictated by Hemingway’s diabetes problem?” he asked. He added, regarding the novelist’s way with mixing a cocktail: “Hemingway always got it wrong.” 

Of the vesper, the vodka-gin martini variation made famous by fictional spy James Bond, Mr. Winchester said, “I would not be sad if this drink disappeared.” He added that you couldn’t make it anyway, because one of its ingredients, Kina Lillet, hasn’t been produced for years. Ms. Saunders, meanwhile, berated the French Martini. She mainly disliked the blend of vodka, pineapple juice and Chambord for the way it made people behave. That is, badly. 

As the table’s resident agave ace, Mr. Olson trained his sights on the el diablo, a newly popular drink from the 1940s, made of tequila, creme de cassis and ginger ale. “It’s great that bars are starting to think outside the margarita when it comes to tequila cocktails,” Mr. Olson said. “But when they decide to put a different tequila cocktail on the menu, they’re moving to the el diablo. When you add ginger ale to tequila, you kill the agave. What makes it worse is a lot of that ginger ale is coming out of a soda gun.” 

A few of the drinks executed by the panel are still so little known that their deaths would be little noticed. Robert Hess lambasted the snowball cocktail, taken from the famed Savoy Cocktail Book. “When I see equal parts of ingredients in a cocktail recipe, I get suspicious,” Mr. Hess said. “It’s too convenient.” The stomach-churning, gin-based formula for the snowball boasts matching doses of Creme de Violette, Creme de Menthe, anisette and cream. “This may be the only bad cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book,” Mr. Hess suggested. 

Mr. Wondrich laid into the bath cure, the house drink at Chicago’s famous Pump House. Resembling an early ancestor of the Long Island Iced Tea, it called for six kinds of liquors, adding up to a full eight-and-one-half ounces of booze. “This drink should not only not be made, it should not even be thought about,” Mr. Wondrich said. 

Charles H. Baker Jr., the mid-20th-century cocktail writer and mixologist, was left bloodied and battered by the speakers. About Baker’s Holland Razor Blade — a blend of Holland gin, lemon juice and cayenne pepper — Mr. Duff said, “To say that the Holland Razor Blade is your favorite Baker cocktail is like saying you ride a T. Rex to work — it’s not possible, and it can’t be pleasant.” 

Mr. Duff further suggested that Hemingway and Baker, who were pals, may have represented the original “axis of evil,” cocktail-wise.

Liquor and Its Myths

If you cover the drinking world, you can't help but take note of the ludicrious notions and habits people pick up in regard to how they order, drink and think about liquor. As much as mixologists like to think of the modern bar as a classroom, few barflies learn their lessons. Instead they cling to myth, superstition, marketing notions, and stuff they learned back in college or on television. Recently, I collected a number of the misguided, but stubborn beliefs stubbornly held by the American drinker into an article for the New York Times, drawing on the experiences and viewpoints of a couple dozen notes bartenders and distillers (of which I managed to cite an even dozen in the piece). As expected, the feature got a strongly positive response from the bartending community. What the public thought of it, I do not know. But if I've caused just one person to stop asking about the worm in mezcal or order their whiskey based on the age statement, I've done my work.

The Myths of the Bar, Debunked

By ROBERT SIMONSON

EDUCATING the average drinker on the qualities of firewater, and how to best enjoy it, has been one of the central credos of the new generation of mixologists. “Knowledge!” they cry, as they throw back shots of Fernet-Branca.

But some booze-addled misconceptions continue to cling like vines to the lizard brain of the American tippler. An army of bartenders can protest that a wetter martini is both more delectable and historically accurate, but certain committed fanciers of the cocktail, channeling their inner Gray Flannel Suit, will still maintain the drink attains perfection only at its driest, when vermouth is banished from the barroom.

Such antiquated contentions are like “nails on a chalkboard,” said Eric Alperin, an owner of the Varnish in Los Angeles. “I think the reason people stand by those myths is because it is a sound bite they’ve acquired, and a bar is a place to feel confident with yourself and exude a little know-how.”

Many reinforce a drinker’s virility, particularly with regard to the most manly of spirits — whiskey.

Some of those idées fixes:

OLDER IS BETTER “It’s absolute nonsense,” said Ronnie Cox, director of theGlenrothes, a Speyside Scotch. “It’s not about oldness, it’s about maturity. Age doesn’t mean anything other than that whiskey’s been in that cask for that amount of time.” Making whiskey requires finding the right balance among myriad elements. A few whiskeys prosper with advanced age, but many fall off a cliff into sensory disharmony at a certain point. Rittenhouse Rye 100, from Kentucky, takes only four years to reach the chewy, spicy sweet spot bartenders swear by. But the Old Pulteney 21-year-old Scotch probably needed to attain drinking age to hit its briny perfection.

Tonia Guffey, a bartender at Dram in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, offered an anthropomorphic analogy. “Not every human hits their peak of beauty at the same age,” she said, “and neither does every spirit.”

WATER IS AN ABOMINATION John McCarthy, head bartender at the Lower East Side bar Mary Queen of Scots, thinks the aversion to diluting whiskey is a matter of machismo. “We’re American men,” Mr. McCarthy said, “and if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not good!” But softening the blow, said Franky Marshall, a bartender at the Monkey Bar, is far from a bad thing. “Adding a little water to whiskey serves to ‘open up’ the spirit, releasing an array of subtler flavors. It can truly show you a completely different profile of a whiskey.” It’s also what most Scots do, and they ought to know. Alla Lapushchik, owner ofPost Office, a Williamsburg bar with a vast whiskey list, offers water even when customers don’t ask for it. “You don’t put water in beer or wine, so it doesn’t occur to people to do it with whiskey,” Ms. Lapushchik said. “I’ve had people order Booker’s 127 proof neat.”

SWEET IS SILLY Another fallacy that hurts the pride of many a modern mixologist is the widely held belief that sweet cocktails are inherently insipid. “I think expectations are still informed by the cocktails of the pre-craft era, when people added sour mix and cranberry cocktail,” said Tom Chadwick, owner of Dram, who insists that all his cocktails, even the sweet ones — like the bar’s current Loose Noose, a mix of bourbon, sweet vermouth, amontillado sherry, and touches of cinnamon syrup and allspice dram — are balanced, with the spirit, citrus, sweetener and other elements cohabiting in the glass. “It’s a way of communicating that you’re sophisticated — ‘I don’t want a Mudslide. I want something complicated.’ ”

GIVE THEM THEIR PROPS The reputation and quality of tequilas and mezcals has risen recently. But drinkers fall back on frat-boy practices, like asking for a lime and salt, a ritual that dates to the days of lousy tequilas. “I say, ‘Whatever spirit I serve you is good, ” said Ivy Mix, a bartender at the Clover Club in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, “and you don’t need to cover it up.’ ” Then there’s the worm in the mezcal bottle. “It was created by Gusano Rojo in the 1950s,” said Steve Olson, an owner of the Lower East Side tequila and mezcal bar Viktor & Spoils, of the widely sold mezcal brand, “when the tequila market had boomed and left mezcal far behind, as an enterprising marketing attempt to get mezcal away from its image as moonshine.”

MISCELLANEOUS MYTHS Despite the avalanche of articles after absinthe’s reintroduction to the United States a few years ago, some ideas about it remain rooted in the 1890s. Customers “really hope they’ll hallucinate,” said Maxwell Britten, beverage director at Maison Premiere, a Williamsburg bar well stocked with absinthe. “I tell them, ‘If you drink enough alcohol of any category, I guarantee you will hallucinate.’ ” Karin Stanley, a bartender at Dutch Kills, in Long Island City, Queens, rattled off her litany of ripostes: “ ‘No, you aren’t going to see anything’; ‘no, you aren’t going to cut your ear off’; and ‘yes, it is supposed to taste like that.’ ”

Other delusions as tough as jerky: that vodka has no calories and is better for you, Ms. Stanley said; that “Jägermeister is made with deer’s blood,” offered St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn; and that Irish whiskey brands are Catholic or Protestant, depending on where they’re made. “If you look into the ownership, it’s all international corporations,” Mr. Frizell said. “I don’t think the Irish even care.”

Odds are, many misconceptions will survive. The bar has ever been a greenhouse of hyperbole, folklore and rumor. “I’d say a good 30 percent of what’s said over the mahogany is generally baloney,” said Derek Brown, owner of the Passenger and Columbia Room in Washington. “Why wouldn’t that apply to myths about alcohol, too?”