Author: Richard Murff

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Your Holiday Booze Guide

Holiday cheer and holiday cheers (Photo: Tim Douglas | Pexels)

Writing a spirits column for the holidays can be tricky because while there are cultural constants, every family is different, and Christmas isn’t as hidebound in the menu as Thanksgiving. “Merry Christmas to all” sounds good, but in practice what you get is a lot of holiday-tradition ditches people are fully prepared to die in because a) their tradition is the right one and b) yours is not. Complicating matters is that, even within a family, what you make of this foolishness depends largely on your place in the holiday life cycle. Still believe that implausible story about a fat elf with all the swag? Well, stop reading about booze and go back to the Disney+.

Are you a Gen Zer heading home to spend the holidays with the family? You probably don’t know anything about wine, so it’s time you learn. It’s also time to learn to drink with your parents. Understand that you, young reader, are largely made of rubber and magic, so time and physiology haven’t played the awful trick on you that it played on your parents (read: made them old). They slow it down a bit and drink better stuff. This has its advantages, but it does inevitably lead to talking about whatever the hell you’re drinking ad nauseam. Be prepared.

If you are spending the holidays with a significant other’s family, the same rules apply, but remember that said other might be your host’s special someone, but you aren’t. If you bring a bottle you’ll look like a grown-up. You’ll likely be eating heavy savory meat and casseroles — a bottle of red works well; a Shiraz-Grenache blend will stand up to big flavors without getting too heady. They are generally a good value and will make you look like you know what you are talking about. And unlike politics, you can disagree about booze without flinging casserole at each other.

The part you play in all of this pageantry, of course, changes. If you are Mom or Dad, whether you like it or not, your holidays will have evolved into something completely different. You likely have a houseful of knee-biters acting like deranged contestants on The Price is Right, and those strange things parents say about how Santa is running a surveillance state will suddenly make a lot more sense. It will also explain why they don’t share their hot chocolate. A little self-care is needed here: A little Baileys Irish Crème never hurt anyone. Not many people, at any rate.

We all update traditions for a modern society, but we don’t update them that much. It may not be fair, but we all know that it’s Mom who takes the body blow on Christmas, so Dad needs to be prepared. Break out a bottle of Champagne. If you are making mimosas, don’t worry about the brand. I mean, have some self-respect, but this isn’t the time to splash out. If you hold the orange juice, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot is wonderful if you want to make it an event. Make it an event.

Christmas has a lot of old-world connotations, but you don’t really know what wassail is and certainly don’t know how to make it. Don’t worry about it. There is a made-in-Memphis alternative: Old Dominick’s Memphis Toddy is sort of a modern twist on a spicy holiday quaff. It tastes like you wished traditional drinks actually tasted but don’t.

While bourbons and American whiskeys have a cult-like following these days, tread lightly. The holidays aren’t a sprint, but an endurance race. You’ve got a long day ahead of you, and this is not the place to get into the straight-up whiskey. Not until you have the house to yourself(ish).

Then it’s Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Cheers!

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Game Day Cocktail

Bourbon and Coke (Photo: Jaroslaw Grudzinski | Dreamstime.com)

It’s college football season — whether you are in the Grove, Tiger Lane, or at home — it’s Game Day, and you, gentle reader, need a drink.

Beer is a good go-to for day-drinking because of simple physics: It is relatively low in alcohol and takes up a lot of space, and if you put your cup down to go to the bathroom, you’ve cut your drinking time by a third. Which makes it hard for things to get really out of hand. Still, whether it’s too much gluten or too much “wind,” sometimes only cocktails will do.

The cocktail rules for Game Day are different, and the first is that this is not the time to get too pedantic and start throwing around words like “craft” and “authentic.” With the possible exception of the Grove, if you carry around one of those glass bell jars to smoke your cocktails, you won’t get invited back. You shouldn’t. This is not the time for a cosmo, old-fashioned, or a Sazerac; and unless you plan to wear an actual cheer-squad uniform, do not drink anything called a Dirty Shirley.

Game Day drinks should avoid slicing because in these high-alert days, wielding a knife sends the wrong message to the local security establishment. While it’s not obvious, the drinks should be dark because outside is the one place people are allowed to smoke. I learned this the hard way when I went with a bourbon and branch once, and by third quarter I could see a layer of spent cigarette ash in the bottom of my cup. Which is enough to put anyone back on the wagon.

Of course, drink whatever you want, but football is all about tradition, and nothing says “It’s Game Day under a whiskey blue sky!” like the tried-and-true bourbon and Coke — in a great whacking red Solo cup. Lots of ice and lots of Coke because you’ve got a long stretch of day-drinking ahead of you — even if it’s a night game because you’re still probably going to get started at noon.

A word on your choice of bourbon: There is no need to splash out on the good stuff if you are going to douse it in Coke. If you aren’t drowning your bourbon, there will likely be an awkward hockey-stick in your future where you seem sober enough and then … well … Don’t attempt to maintain that for six hours, 10 if you win, or 14 for a win when your team was supposed to get creamed.

Understand that while all the bourbon on the bottom shelf is cheap, only some of it is rot-gut. The Coke is there for a bit of pep, not to hide you from agonizing reality. Well, actually it does hide the cigarette ash. … At any rate, you can do worse than Very Old Barton, which, believe it or not, is always winning some blind tasting or another. It is good, solid (and evidently award-winning) bourbon that will only set you back about $10. Benchmark, Buffalo Trace’s bottom-shelf entry, is another bourbon that works well as strong Game Day mixer.

Bourbon drinkers have gotten very touchy over the last decade or so but in their defense, bourbon has gotten a lot better, too. Unfortunately, with an uptick in innovation, quality, and choice, you get an uptick in snobbery. We’re all human, aren’t we? If you really can’t stomach the shame of being quite so sensible with your Game Day bourbon, another solid choice is Old Forester’s original expression, at about $20, which is also excellent on the rocks as well.

Obviously, tradition dictates that you mix the concoction with a pom-pom shaker.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

An Old Twist on Gin

Richard Murff
Try a Vesper or an Old Tom this summer.

Cocktail writers spend a lot of time making themselves useful by carrying on about “a new twist on a classic cocktail.” Not me, I’m about to suggest two very old twists to jump into this summer. On May 8th, in celebration of Ian Fleming’s birthday I raised a glass of — to quote James Bond in Casino Royale (1953) — “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet …” garnished with a great whacking lemon peel.

The Vesper holds its own today. Lillet blanc (you can’t get the original Kina Lillet anymore) is a blonde fortified dessert wine that replaces the dry vermouth. This works well in a world of sweeter cocktails and has more body than the classic martini. If you aren’t a closet bartender and want to outsource one, pop into Acre Restaurant, helmed by chefs Wally Joe and Andrew Adams. The food is great, but they’ve also got a hell of a bartender, Acre’s bar program director Morgan McKinney. If you are going to go around town ordering something like a Vesper, you need a bartender who knows her game. These things go down way too smooth, by the by.

The James Bond of the movies may have had a signature drink, but the literary Bond and his author were all over the place cocktail-wise. Which brings us to another old/new twist: Old Tom Gin. It was the first English style, sweeter than the London dry that replaced it, but drier than the Dutch Jenever style. It gets its name from the original gin craze that came a lemon twist away from wholesale wreckage of English society in the early 18th century. At the time, English law said you had to have an eyewitness to finger someone for a crime, so unlicensed gin dealers shut themselves up in small houses with no windows and attached a cast-iron cat head and paw coming out the front door. Need a dram? Put your copper in the tomcat’s mouth and a spout hidden in the paw would fill up your glass or jar — or pour straight into your mouth like a pre-industrial vending machine. 

The base spirit used was distilled from malted barley sourced from Scottish whiskey producers. After a second distillation to get the proof up, they doctored it with sweet botanicals to mask a complete lack of quality control. With invention of the continuous still in 1831, producers were dealing with a more refined spirit and the cleaner, drier “London dry” style was born.

A few years ago, Hayman’s, which makes a fantastic London dry, came out with an Old Tom style. Several distillers have followed suit, including the very good Ransom gin. In a market flooded with new gins, take a crack at this OG — original gin. In full disclosure, I haven’t made an Old Tom martini — but it might be interesting. Not having a sweet-tooth, I wouldn’t make a Vesper out of it. It is, though, a novel twist on the classic gin and tonic (or soda).

The bourbon boom was fueled by reviving “authentic” styles for modern tastes — and now that it’s hot as Hades, why not do the same for gin? Besides, we’ve got a new megalomaniac coming out of Moscow who is out of central casting for the next Bond villain, so I’m not sure that the Vesper really is all that out of step with the times. If you make one, use Ukrainian vodka. 

Everything old, it seems, is new again. As for Ian Fleming, he may not have been the greatest writer, but as someone who has written an espionage novel that did not become a multi-generational cultural icon, I’ve really got to admire the man’s long game. 

Correction: An earlier version of this column inadvertently listed Morgan McKinney as Acre’s bartender without crediting her by name. McKinney is the bar program director at Acre. The Memphis Flyer does not condone sexism in any way, shape, or form, and we apologize for this error.

Categories
Food & Drink Food Reviews

On the Yacht … Rocks

Photo: Filip Baoti | Unsplash

I am not even sure how I wound up sailing in a North American Championship regatta, but there I was — after a brutal day of races that soaked me outside and, after what I can only describe as a Lake Erie bidet, inside as well. We drifted back to the hosting yacht club where a pleasant but serious fellow with a phone in one hand was pointing at the darkening squall line with the other. “Glad you’re back,” he said. “The radar says you’ve got about 30 minutes before that hits.” Well, if the previous three hours were the longest in my life, that “30 minutes” was the shortest; about seven minutes later, we had to tie up and abandon the boat to its fate.

Sailing is one of those sports that, were it not so damned expensive, you’d ask yourself amid the alternating soaking cold and the wicked heat: “Screw waterboarding, let’s send them sailing!” And, like other expensive hobbies such as duck hunting, golf, or almost flying into space, sailing tends to turn into a lifestyle choice. Which raises the age-old question: What do you do with a drunken sailor? Or a whole dock of wet sailors who’ve recently left their expensive lifestyle choices to the whims of Neptune or some watery goddess who feels compelled to torment sailors?

You feed them rum. It’s the drink of island paradises, prison colonies, and drunken sailors. The sailors’ rum is Mount Gay from Barbados, and it’s hard to go wrong. It tastes like, well, what rum is supposed to taste like. The company gives out just enough of its red baseball caps at regattas to make them the sought-after sailing accessory. If you’re really hep, the hat will be terminally sun damaged.

Pusser’s Rum is trying to break into the market by sponsoring regattas and making sure that the hosting yacht clubs are slinging a lot of discounted product. I’ve reviewed Pusser’s Gunpowder Proof rum here before, which tasted to me like rum-flavored moonshine. Perhaps it wounded me on some emotional level because its standard expression had hints of the same. Still, as I crowded into the yacht club with the boat owners grimly searching for their insurance agent’s phone number, they were practically giving the stuff away in nifty little tin mugs. It was called a Pusser’s Painkiller, and depending on how much pain you are trying to kill, you mix 2, 3, or 4 ounces of Pusser’s with 4 ounces of pineapple juice, 1 ounce of cream of coconut, 1 ounce orange juice, serve on the rocks, and grate with nutmeg.

I’m not really a tropical drinks kind of guy, but this was actually very good. If you are a tropical drinks sort or an avid Jimmy Buffet fan, the Painkiller is likely right up your alley, so give it a whirl while it’s still hot. For me, it killed the “moonshine” nose of Pusser’s but raised the question: If you have to drown it in fruit juice and coconut cream to get it down, why drink it at all? Well, in this case, some young thing in a regatta shirt just handed it to me, and sometimes that’s reason enough.

The squall passed almost as quickly as it came, leaving the boat dirty but unharmed. I started sailing about 10 years ago when writing a story on the Delta Sailing Association down in Hernando. I was told that I really couldn’t do the story justice unless I learned how to sail. In truth, they were really just short of crew. At any rate, a decade on and I’m up in Cleveland at the North American Championship, vividly not qualifying for the Worlds. Maybe all this inland sailing divorces you from old naval traditions because the crew I learned to sail with all drink martinis.

With gin. And they are very adamant about this.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

The English Connection: Digby Champagne

Richard Murff

That sparkling drink that we know as champagne is less a French innovation than you might think. It was Sir Kenelm Digby, an eccentric Englishman and one-time political prisoner, who first created the wine bottles sturdy enough to hold the bubbles in check, although it never occurred to him that wine bottles would ever hold bubbles.

Over in Paris, one Marquis de Saint-Évremond — a court hanger-on and charming bon vivant — managed to enrage one of King Louis XIV’s more powerful and humorless ministers and got himself exiled. Being a gentler age (for aristocrats, at least), Saint-Évremond was allowed to take his cache of white, tart wine from the Champagne region with him. Because Champagne is cold and wet, the fermentation process of these wines would stop in the winter and pick back up in the spring — causing a little residual CO2 to linger. As wine was stored in big wooden casks, these bubbles would dissipate slowly and then all at once when the bung was removed. The historical irony here is that Dom Pierre Pérignon — the Benedictine monk so associated with the drink — spent his life trying to get the bubbles out of champagne.

So Saint-Évremond, essentially a house guest of the English court, did what house guests do and brought some wine. What happened, in effect, was that he bottled the wine (in Digby’s strong English bottles) before the second fermentation picked back up, trapping the residual CO2 as the yeast started to do its thing again. When opened, the stuff fizzed and tickled noses, and the court went wild. He ordered more champagne and did it again. He wasn’t really doing it for science, or even industry. For Saint-Évremond, the new wine was all about sex and money.

You could argue that it still is.

What made the Champagne region perfect for champagne is that it was cold and wet. Now, with rising temperatures, both yield and, in some cases, the flavors the grapes are producing are changing. Quick ripening in warmed weather causes sugars to concentrate, producing a honey-like wine. It isn’t just Champagne; Riesling-
producing regions in Germany are becoming more welcoming to hardier grapes like pinot noir, but more problematic for the delicate varieties. On the other side of this phenomenon is that some regions that haven’t been suitable for wine production for centuries, are again.

Wine production in Britain essentially fell off with the global cooling period that coincided with the fall of Rome. Now, due to rising temperatures, places like Kent and Sussex in the south of England are starting to hit that just-so level of cold and wet to give good sparkling wines a go. I’d read about it, but it wasn’t until Mrs. M and I were having a St. George’s Day dinner that a friend brought a bottle of English “champagne” as a gift from one history nerd to another.

It’s appropriately called “Digby” after Sir Kenelm. It isn’t vintage — the company was founded in 2013 — so it lacks that breadiness of a lot of older sparklers. My suspicion is that these wines are so expensive (and therefore rare) that most people wouldn’t know that they are supposed to taste like that. Instead, you get something like the pastry of an apple tart. It’s a little weightier in feel and has a nice acidity that finishes clean. The bubbles are compact, sparkling with fizz, but if you are looking for that carbonated “bite,” you’ll be disappointed.

In some fit of cultural version of “what grows together, goes together” — the English have made an understated champagne.

As much as it galls the French, you can’t have champagne without the English. What the hell, they did it to us with rock-and-roll: bounced an import back to its homeland with a British twist. And like the rock-and-roll lifestyle, it’s still all about sex and money.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

What We Call Vodka

Photo: Stocksnapper | Dreamstime.com

For Americans, toasts are for weddings. In that part of the world that used to be snuggled up behind the Iron Curtain, the criteria are a little wider: a) booze is within reach, and b) you’ve made eye contact with another mammal. A few years ago, I found myself at dinner in Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine about 19 miles from the Russian border, consisting of Western NGO sorts, locals, and a faction from Serbia. The dinner was lousy with vodka toasts to each other’s health. At least that’s what I thought it was — turned out to be something called pertsivka. “What is pertsivka?” I asked.

“It’s horilka made with hot pepper for spice.”

“What is horilka?”

“What Americans call vodka because they don’t know the difference.”

In Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, they’ve always had their local varieties of the stuff, and these are often lightly flavored — all with local names. The term “vodka” just took hold in the U.S. as a catchall because we associated it with the Russians, who were scaring the pants off us at the time, and that’s what they called it.

I’ve never really had strong opinions about vodka for the simple reason that it is, by definition and design, (theoretically) odorless and tasteless. So I was never quite sure what, exactly, I was supposed to have an opinion about. After the horilka I developed opinions, and quickly. While two whiskeys will taste very different, with vodka — generally an unblended, unaged grain spirit — it’s more a matter of texture: harsh vs. smooth. Dark Eyes doesn’t taste much different from Belvedere, but one burns going down and the other slides home without watering the eyes.

For their part, the Russians aren’t nearly as pedantic about their national tipple as the French are about wine. They drink so much of the stuff that they’ll make it out of just about anything: potatoes, vegetables, or, as in one famous case, the dried fruits and nuts sourced from what a Moscow zookeeper should have been feeding the monkeys. It hardly mattered because under the Soviets, all the decent vodka was sold abroad as Marx slowly turned in his grave. 

In college, I knew a guy whose family owned a distillery in Wisconsin. I asked him the name so I could buy a bottle. Not only was their entire business in Eastern Europe, they didn’t even bottle the stuff; it was sold in six-packs of 12-ounce cans. Which explains why that dinner in Kharkiv turned out the way it did: It wasn’t a drinking game, you understand, but I lost anyway.

You’ll never find pertsivka stateside (I’ve tried), but there are a lot of vodkas made in different ways to try. Belvedere is made from rye in Poland, and again, it goes down smooth. A French vodka — Cîroc — is made from “five different” grapes and is absolutely worth a try. Grain-based Dark Eyes, on the other hand, is out of St. Louis and is absolutely not. Smirnoff, the best-selling vodka in the world, is actually British, but it is distilled almost anywhere it has a market. I’ve had it made with rice, but it tasted like sake.

Being relatively free of impurities picked up from barrel aging, vodka has a reputation of being easier on the hangover. And this is true enough, but it will dehydrate you as fast as any other spirit. Stir in those sugary mixers (I’m looking at you, Moscow mule) and it will give your headache a boom that brown water could only dream about.  

In Ukraine, they drink the stuff neat and out of cans. The closest American equivalent is the dry vodka martini. My issue is that it is another case of Americans misnaming things. This concoction is called a “kangaroo.” The reason we call it a vodka martini is that not even Sean Connery could order a “kangaroo, shaken, not stirred” and make it sound cool.  

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Sweetens Cove: Blended Whiskey by Marianne Eaves and Drew Holcomb

Yes, the infinitely talented and likable Drew Holcomb has waded into the very premium whiskey game as part of the ownership group bringing you Sweetens Cove. And yes, there is a long, sweaty history between country and folk music and corn likker, but this stuff isn’t exactly moonshine. Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors aren’t exactly a country act, but a refined blend of folk and rock. Sweetens Cove is a refined blend of whiskey.

While we’re wrecking clichés, Sweetens Cove isn’t named after some outlaw hideout down in the holler either, but a pilgrimage golf course outside Chattanooga that, without a clubhouse, still manages to attract golfers from around the country. A fact that would have made more of an impression were I not too much of a spaz to appreciate the sport. Holcomb told me that he was introduced to both whiskey (or at least the good stuff) and golf during the same semester abroad in Scotland. He was a student at the University of Tennessee, on a scholarship endowed by Peyton Manning — another owner of the new whiskey producer.

Another cliché that’s getting busted with each bottle is that the distiller is the only one who can produce a fine whiskey. Sweetens Cove takes five select whiskeys from Tennessee and Kentucky distilleries and marries them under the expert eye of their master blender, Marianne Eaves. If you’d like to meet the lady, well, I haven’t got her home number, but she’s featured in Neat: The Story of Bourbon on Hulu. Despite the star-studded ownership group, to hear Holcomb tell it, she’s the real star of the show.

The price tag for this stuff is around $230. I’m a notorious skinflint, so my shock is less strictly financial and more about the principle of the thing. Your reflexes may vary. At any rate, that price tag was more than my handlers at the Flyer were willing to spot, so I had to track down a friend, one Jimbo Lattimore, who was willing to share a snort of the stuff.

The color is a medium amber, the nose rich caramel and butterscotch. Jimbo — something of a foodie — found some bananas Foster. After he mentioned it, I caught it as well. This business of picking up aspects of a whiskey only after the first one to speak up mentions it is just one of those things. You could hold tastings in strict silence to get a wider array of impressions, but what’s the fun in that? That’s just a hair too close to drinking alone. Don’t drink alone.

The taste, while excellent, was not as hot as you’d expect for the 102 proof we were drinking. A couple of drops of water opened it up to something that was strangely light without turning loose of its richness. There was something of old wood to it — not anything like the smoke of Islay scotches — but almost the way that the library stacks smell. And yet the deep caramel and butterscotch lingered on. At the risk of sounding like I’m moonlighting for a greeting card outfit, this stuff just dances across the tongue. In my notes, that phrase is in quotes, although I can’t remember which one of us said it. I’ll take the blame. The finish is long and balanced: warm, not harsh.

Sweetens Cove is a great whiskey. More than that, it’s part of a larger trend of which I’m a big fan: the blended whiskeys. Don’t misunderstand me, a single barrel, provided that it’s the right one, is a thing of beauty. These producers focused on blending different whiskeys, again, providing that they are the right ones, open up a new brief for a master blender to experiment. And that opens up a whole new world of profiles for the brown water fan to play with.

Now, go out and play.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Bad Juju: The Perils of Cheap Spiced Rum

I’m not even sure just where you’d get it in Memphis, or even in Tennessee for that matter. Still, the vaccines are flowing, cases of the crud are dropping, and summer is nearing. So here is my boozy travel warning: Don’t buy Kirkland Spiced Rum.

I was in Birmingham on some promotional work and visited an old friend from college. In Alabama, wine in the grocery store is old hat, and liquor sales are dominated by the state ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) stores. It was in one of these places where I found this bit of dark magic.

A word of caution — approach all flavored liquors the way you would a friend who once threw up on your shoes: They might never do it again, but you know it’s in the playbook. Using lime-flavored gin does not make the classic G&T one step easier. It makes your cocktails taste like you’re adding a dash of Scope to look clever. Just use the real thing. You aren’t that busy.

I trust that I don’t need to remind readers of the dangers of an ill-advised case of Bud Light Orange, which tastes something like slamming a thin beer without taking the Jolly Rancher out of your mouth. A fine way to ruin both flavors.

Getting back to the spiced rum, the danger lurking inside a bottle of Kirkland (the same people who bring you those 47-packs of T-shirts and athletic socks at Costco) is that good spiced rums actually do exist.

Sailor Jerry is a very good option. Normally, kitschy labels are a red flag, but not here. It’s a great spiced rum at a decent price, and in a bottle that looks like your grandfather might have picked it up on his lively gap-year in Vietnam.

For purists who want their rum from the Caribbean, you can’t go wrong with Cruzan 9. It’s excellent, although I don’t advise going to their distillery in St. Croix — plenty of local color, you understand, but not the sort of operation to put the industrial world at ease.

A lot depends on what you’re using your spiced rum for. Drinking it neat? Cocktail? Appeasing Baron Samedi or some other netherworld haint? If it’s the latter, try Boukman Botanical Rhum, made in Haiti and one of the best around. Although its voodoo properties aren’t verified by the ATF.

Kirkland, on the other hand, is an evil spirit in and of itself. Sure, their “Army Mobilization Size” pack of underwear is a great value, but the delicacies of producing a spiced rum that doesn’t taste — if not unholy, at least unnatural — seems to be beyond them. What wasn’t off-brand was the size of the bottle and its attendant price. To a real skinflint, this is dazzling. As a lifelong tightwad, trust me on this: Walk away.

Perhaps I’ve over-sold it a bit; Kirkland isn’t an evil spirit. Despite all effort to the contrary, this rum lacks the character to attain evil status. It’s like wandering up to a haunted castle in a dark forest only to realize that it’s made of vinyl siding. Drinking Kirkland Spiced Rum is like watching a middle school theater club dramatize something called spiced rum.

It’s just awful.

I wouldn’t even mention the stuff, but soon the wife and I will be scooting down to the Gulf Coast for our annual skin-cancer invitational. After paying the rental on the beach house, you might happen to stop in one of Alabama’s friendly and helpful ABC stores and be hypnotized by the sheer volume and price of Kirkland and find yourself saying: “Brenda, we both know that we’re going to spend the week drinking like deranged Parrot Heads, and here is a bottle of rum that could float the Queen Anne’s Revenge for a fair, reasonable price.”

Free isn’t a reasonable price in this case; and as far as fair goes, quaff this stuff and you deserve whatever you get.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Negroni Fever: An Examination of the Cocktail of the Moment

CREDIT: Richard Murff

It’s anyone’s guess which sort of isolation triggers more drinking — pandemics or the morte blanco that hit the other week and blew out all out the water mains (ahem, manes). Still, fluffy snow lacks the element of fear of a first-rate plague, so it’s a different kind of drinking. I sat at my desk ghostwriting a comedy, looking out my window at the soft, muffled landscape and pretending that I was writing my own damn comedy in some place like Gstaad. Granted, it would have had to have been a very flat part of Gstaad, but if you are going to sit around visualizing some swank ski resort during a travel ban, you’d better start drinking like it.

So it was then that I found myself drinking what, if social media is to be believed, must be the trendiest cocktail in the known universe. According to the Drinks International website, it’s been the second most popular cocktail in the world for five years running, with an Instagram hashtag of over half a million posts. It does make a pretty picture. A book dedicated to that single drink has just come out. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Negroni.

Richard Murff

The Negroni

Ehhh … it’s all right. It’s popular at any rate.

According to legend, an Italian count (of course) Camillo Negroni was sitting at the Bar Casoni in Florence, drinking an Americano — made with vermouth, Campari, and club soda — and he decided that he needed something un pó stronger. I reckon the count was having a bad day, so he asked the bartender to swap out the club soda for gin. I’ve met a few countesses over the course of my career, and the last one I had lunch with didn’t appear capable of having a bad day. You never can tell.

Well, it’s a great story and also a good make-it-at-home cocktail because you really can’t mess up the construction: equal parts gin, sweet (or red) vermouth, Campari, and garnish with either an orange or lemon peel. That’s it.

Honestly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Normally if I’d made a drink with so much global hype and it came out tasting like this, I’d have assumed I’d just done it wrong. But you really can’t screw it up. This is just the way a Negroni tastes. It’s hard to explain, especially for someone who’s never had much vermouth rosso or Campari. Although I’m an old hand with gin.

Despite looking like a liquified Jolly Rancher, the Campari is actually pretty bitter. Not viciously so, but it was the first thing that hit me. Littlebit took a snort and handed it back to me, shaking her head. For her part, what Mrs. M picked up was the sweetness of the vermouth russo, and she isn’t wrong either. Perhaps those dueling elements may be that secret to the Negroni’s phenomenal success — other than the fact that Instagram is largely an atomic bandwagon.

The Negroni’s combination of bitter and sweet can be refreshing, and being as light as it is, it lingers on the palate well. Without the use of simple syrup, what sweetness that it has doesn’t cling.

I’ll admit that sometimes I just can’t tell why some things are popular, but the Negroni certainly is, and I can only hope that it’s not just a social media bandwagon at work here. Like Game of Thrones, I can see the appeal even if I’m not into it. Being a professional, I waited for the visions of Switzerland to melt away and transform completely into a 70-degree spring day — about 30 hours — and had another after making ice from boiled water. Again, it was the bitterness that jumped out, but once you know exactly what the hell you are in for, it lacks that slap of betrayal that the first one gives you.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Three Great Whiskeys to Try

Let’s say it together: 2021 is going to be the year of positive drinking. And there is a difference. So just in time to miss Bobby Burns night, Celtic Crossing rolled out its new series of whiskey tastings. There is a virtual option that includes curbside pick-up of samples — then check in on Zoom from the confines of your fortress of solitude, where at least you’re familiar with the germs around you. For health reasons, I chose to attend the outdoor tasting in masked, socially distanced person because a) I’ve already had the crud, and b) after last year the greater health hazard for me is a fatal bout of cabin fever.

There is a world of difference between tastings and drinking (or drankin’ — defined here as “drinking with intent”). These tastings are great for the whiskey lover as well as anyone who would like to know more. It involves more sticking your nose in snifters and talking about it than actually quaffing booze. Although some of these whiskeys were very quaffable.

I’m a Scotch guy in my off hours, so I was excited about the Aberlour 12 Double Cask Matured. That double cask business — first, used bourbon barrels, then, finished off in sherry casks — makes it deep and spicy. Aberlour is a big flavor without the sensation of wallowing in a peat fire. It’s smooth and what fruit there is reminds me of orange peel. It’s not too hot and has a nice, long finish that starts off like — words fail me — crème brûlée. I called the winner early in the evening.

The next was the hard-to-find Blanton’s — the first single-barrel bourbon commercially produced. It is in the Buffalo Trace family of distillers, so quality control is solid: These are the same people who put out George T. Stagg and are responsible for Van Winkle, “the Beatles of Bourbon.” It’s a great drinker, not too big, and easy on the heat, with vanilla and caramel sweetness balanced with an element of black pepper spice at the back. The bottle is easy to recognize: It’s the one that looks like a hand grenade with Secretariat on top. Those racing jockey stoppers have made it something of a collector’s item, which partly explains why the bottles are so hard to find. The retail price is around $50 (ish) and worth every penny. The secondary price, however, can be closer to $200. This is not a $200 bourbon.

Then there was a Bushmills 21-year-old single malt, in a nod to the old country. I’ve always thought of Irish whiskey as Scotch with the corners sanded off, which is true enough, but it sounds more insulting than intended. Bushmills 21, however, is its own creature and isn’t the power-washed version of anything. It’s aged 19 years in old sherry and bourbon barrels before being finished off for a couple more years in madeira barrels. Madeira is a fortified wine in the same ballpark as porto, which accounts for the dried-fruit finish over the spicier notes. There are hints of dark chocolate and toffee.

Fine, but to detect the individual elements took a lot of nosing and talking because the layers aren’t exactly obvious. The whiskey was like an opera where the end result was so brilliant that you are largely unaware of the individual notes. Despite the elements of fruit, there is a dry, almost creamy finish. Which may account for its 96 rating by Whisky Advocate. I tend to agree.

Which goes to show you that even a Scotch guy shouldn’t go calling races in the first lap. The gold went to Team Ireland. The downside, of course, is that Bushmills 21 is a $200+ bottle of whiskey. Whether it’s worth the price is up to you, but it’s certainly justified.

And that is what I mean by positive drinking.