Boozery

Basic Boozery

The Proof Is Out There

Here's a little trivia question: What is the dominant ingredient in nearly all forms of alcoholic beverages, be they spirits, beer or wine?

The answer is not "alcohol." The answer is "water."

There are all sorts of alcohols, but the three most common in everyday human life are methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and propyl alcohol. Of these three, only one is potable (propanol, usually in its "isopropyl" rubbing-alcohol form, will probably just make you sick; methanol, or "wood alcohol," will get you nice and drunk right up to the point where you suffer brain and nerve damage, blindness, and probably death).

But just because ethanol or "grain alcohol" is drinkable, and will get you drunk, does not mean it is palatable in the raw form. If you don't believe me, score a bottle of Everclear from a commercial booze supplier (assuming it is legal to sell this stuff where you live) and take a sip - but only a sip. It's rough stuff. It has no taste whatsoever but it numbs your lips and tongue and burns your throat. It is hardly a likable beverage.

Everclear is a brand of grain alcohol. In its 190 proof (190°) format it is essentially what liquor makers call "grain neutral spirits." In America, the "proof" is just twice the percentage of alcohol. So a 190° substance is 95% alcohol.

The term "proof" in alcohol measurement comes from an old test which involved saturating gunpowder with the booze and seeing what happened when lit. If it was less than fifty percent alcohol ("proof"), the gunpowder wouldn't burn. These days hydrometers or even more newfangled tools are used, but "proof" and "overproof" are still with us. "Overproof" means, in America, that the substance is more than half alcohol (greater than 100°). Thus Bacardi 151, whose proof is in the name, is a brand of overproof rum.

The Canadian/British system is a little more complex, and if you buy booze that's labelled for sale over there, be aware that it's probably labelled as a different proof than it would be in America. But because of these differences in the way "proof" is handled, more and more liquor makers are just putting a straight alcohol percentage on their labels anyway.

But back to water. Distillation produces some pretty strong stuff. Whiskey, for example, emerges from the stills, prior to aging, as a white, raw, harsh liquor which is 70% alcohol or more. In other words, scotch starts as moonshine, essentially. So do just about all spirits (although what they are fermented from varies, of course). The flavors (and, in the case of brown spirits, the color) develop either through aging, or through flavorings which were either added during the distillation or afterward. The actual material being distilled contributes less than you might think to the flavor - although opinions vary on this (see the Vodka section). And then comes dilution. All manufacturers dilute their booze. It's not so they can rob you; it's to make it drinkable (and also so their product will be at a consistent strength - if you bought one bottle of Tanqueray that was twice as strong as the last bottle you bought, you might get a nasty surprise).

Most spirits (by which I now exclude wine and beer) hover around 80° to 90°, which means that the average bottle of booze is probably at least half water (assuming that the various esters and impurities we call "flavor" make up a negligable percentage of content).

For our purposes, anything under 80° is a fairly weak liquor and anything above the low nineties is a pretty strong one. However, "weak" here is relative; even a 70° bottle of booze will trump the alcohol content of the strongest wine. Wine runs anywhere from 9% to 14% alcohol; fortified wines range from about 14% to the twenties. Beer is even lower; domestic beers in the US are a mere three to six percent alcohol, and even the strong ones only get as high as the bottom of the wine range (which is why if you see a beer which is labelled "barley wine," you know it is pretty stiff stuff for a beer, just as at some point a hard cider ceases to be a cider and becomes an apple wine). But even a very strong beer is probably about ninety percent water.

This has been your lesson in the market realities of alcohol (among other things). Some booze is expensive because it is actually labor-intensive, or made in small, non-automated batches. But most booze is expensive simply because it is heavily regulated and taxed. You pay for your sins ... and your bottle of somewhat alcoholic, flavored water.

White Grain Spirits: Gin, Vodka, and Aquavit

The spirits in this section don't seem to be sold aged very often. Some aquavits are aged - but how common is aquavit in America anyway? - and Bols makes one oddball gin that apparently is. I'm told that there are several types of aged vodkas (see below), but have never seen one.

Among other things, the aging question is why these are white spirits. Aging in wood is what colors spirits brown (aging in metal, glass, or crockery won't do it), so if you see a spirit in this category that is brown/yellow and you don't think it's been aged in wood, it's colored (see Bols Zeer Oude).

Gin

Gin starts as a neutral grain spirit that gets a second distillation with aromatic plants. The plants are either physically added to the spirit so they can steep, or are hung/suspended over the liquid so the vapors can pass over them before recondensing. The exact set of aromatics varies with each gin - that's the secret recipe - but will always include juniper berries; the word "gin" is a British contraction of the Dutch "genever," which means "juniper." If it doesn't have juniper, it's not gin.

The exact set of aromatics used in a given gin can be very complex. The Bombay Sapphire bottle depicts almonds, lemon peel, liquorice, juniper, orris root, angelica, coriander, cassia, cubeb, and grains of paradise ... and I have no reason to doubt that they're all used as claimed, even though Sapphire is a dry gin and its flavor is therefore comparatively subtle. I'm sure they all contribute something to the flavor, but my tongue is not that clever.

Classification of gin varies depending on which book you read, but I prefer to make it simple: Dry gins are for mixing and all other gins (Holland and Plymouth styles, notably) are for drinking straight. Dry gins, as noted, tend to have subtler flavors and be less sweet than other gins. This is not to say that you couldn't make a Martini with a very aromatic, highly flavored gin, nor to say that you couldn't drink a classic dry gin chilled and straight, and I've done both. You just need to be aware of what you're doing. A gin that has strong tastes is less likely to mix harmoniously with other things - notably vermouth, which has a complex mess of aromatics of its own. (Vermouth is discussed in part five.)

This division is muddied a little, though, by the spread, in recent years, of dry-style gins that are more strongly flavored than the normal London-style gin. Most of these are small-batch products, but a small-batch product does not mean a small manufacturer - Tanqueray Ten, for example, is a boutique offshoot of that manufacturer's normal line. Calling these "boutique gins" is therefore not strictly accurate. I'll call them Specialty Gins, which is bland enough to be accurate.

Holland-style gin is the original gin. Most accounts say that a Dutch professor of medicine developed his "juniper water" or "essence of juniper" as a restorative somewhere in the early 1600s. The Bols company, which claims to have begun in 1575, was apparently there from the beginning. Holland gin is often bottled at a comparatively low proof (70° or thereabouts). Also, the most traditional Holland gins use malted barley as part of the grain basis; this gives the gin a slight scotch or bourbon taste, depending on who you ask. A gin that is labeled Oude (old) or Zeer Oude (very old) may not actually be aged; this more likely means "old style" and probably cues that it was made with malted grains. These gins will also taste sweeter than a London-style gin and are primarily for drinking chilled and straight.

Some Holland-style gins you might be able to find, in case you want to try them:
- Bols Zeer Oude is a somewhat malty gin. It is no longer sold in the crockery bottle, alas. It is yellow, but this is because of caramel coloring.
- Bols Jonge is a drier, but low-proof, gin which is sort of halfway between a classic Holland Genever and a London style.
- DeKuyper Geneva will mostly be found here from its Canadian bottling. It is a pretty aggressive example of Holland style and is apparently a "love or hate" sort of thing, judging from comments I've heard. Definitely one to take straight only.
- Bokma is the other major brand of note, which I've never yet encountered.

In the late 1600s, William of Orange took the British throne. He didn't get along with France and he put prohibitive taxes on French goods, notably their wine. However, he permitted his subjects to make their own Genever, which he considered to have "brought from home." Seriously - anyone who wanted could set up a legal distillery simply by asking for a permit. Within forty years gin production in England went from half a million to twenty million gallons. This is when gin got its nickname as "mother's ruin" and Hogarth drew social-comment pictures such as Gin Alley showing the havoc gin had wrought. A lot of this gin was deadly bathtub-style stuff, so it wasn't just excessive consumption that was the problem. Around the mid-1700s the British started taxing and controlling the sale of gin a little better, and by the 1800s, when the continuous still was invented and the situation had calmed down, what they had developed was London-style gin.

The major makers of London gin are surely familiar to you: Gordon's, Gilbey's, Boodles, Bombay, Beefeater, Tanqueray. The "normal" products of most of these companies are all, to my mind, mostly interchangeable mixing gins. Opinions do vary, though. Many people believe that Beefeater is more strongly flavored than other gins in this category, and I've heard several people associate a strong citrus taste with it. Tanqueray is often labelled in gin listings as an "oily" gin. And so on.

Plymouth gin is an offshoot of English gin, associated historically with the Royal Navy (which also gave us "pink gin" - gin and Angostura bitters). I'm told it is sweeter and a lower proof. It's meant to be drunk straight. There is apparently only one brand of Plymouth gin anyone will ever find in this country, and Plymouth is also the brand name. I'm also told by one source that Bols Jonge (see above) is a very close substitute.

Specialty gins, as discussed above, are a comparatively recent development and may relate to the revival of the gin market in this country. Around the time the adman in the gray suit with the three-Martini lunch went the way of the dodo, the gin consumption of America underwent a long slow slide. (Vodka fortunes were rising at the same time - see below.) Gin was what your parents drank; it's a little too idiosyncratic to be an easy mixer, whereas vodka will roll over and cooperate with just about anything; and a whole generation was avoiding strong spirits of any kind, preferring beer unless it was to spike the punch at the school dance. Gin had to wait for the cocktail revival of the nineties to come back. When it did, manufacturers began thinking about ways to make gin interesting to those people just discovering it.

Some people consider Bombay Sapphire one of these specialty gins, and it is definitely more aromatic than the normal Bombay product (it's also a higher proof - 94° compared to their normal 80°). On the other hand, the Sapphire recipe dates to 1761 - hardly a fancy new boutique gin.

Tanqueray Ten is one of these specialty offshoots, and also Tanqueray Malacca which is no longer sold in this country. (The latter is more of a Holland-style gin, I'm told.) Hendrick's is a gin made in Scotland which is acquiring a following here; it is flavored, among other things, with cucumbers and rose petals. Junipero is a specialty gin made by the Anchor brewing company in California (the people who make Anchor Steam beer, among other things. Damrak is Bols' contribution to the specialty line of dry gins, and Bols also makes an unusual product called Corenwyn (grain wine) which is the only gin I have ever seen aged in wood. If I ever find it, I will let everyone know how it tastes.

The last thing to consider in gin is flavored gin or a "gin compound." These are pretty uncommon, with one exception, and if you don't mind, I will discuss that with the flavored vodkas.

Vodka

Vodka is basically what would happen if you made gin but didn't put in the flavorings. I'm sorry to be so sparse on vodka, but I have little use for it; I keep some in the house in case someone demands a mixed drink made with it, and for no other reason.

To me, vodka has no personality of its own at all - it simply tastes like diluted alcohol. There has been a recent revolution in specialty and boutique vodkas - probably to combat the resurgence of gin - and many of these manufacturers make a point of insisting that their vodka is distilled from potatoes or from soft wheat harvested in the dark of the moon by Vestal virgins, or what-have-you. I am sure there are people who can taste a difference in the flavor of neutral alcohol based on whether it's made from, say, wheat or potatoes, but I can't.

(Note, though, that I don't apply this same rule to distillates of other, less starchy botanicals - a raw rum surely does not taste like a raw tequila - nor do I apply it to distillates which are allowed to retain more of their impurities and are aged for a while to bring their differences out - i.e. malt whiskeys. Just vodka.)

Vodka originates in the cold reaches of upper Europe and Asia - Russia, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states are its ancestral home. The word "vodka" is a diminuitive of "voda," water - i.e. "little water." One reason vodka spread to become a worldwide spirit is the diaspora of people fleeing Russia at various times. Vodka, as a basically neutral spirit, can be made from almost anything if you try hard enough, and it often is. I've put it in the "grain spirits," but historically vodka has been made from whatever is available. During several periods in Russian history a great deal of cheap vodka has been made from beetroot - probably sugar beet - or the molasses obtained from same. (This ends up producing a very rum-like vodka, which is not considered desirable. Too much flavor, apparently.) One reason Polish vodkas often make a point of their potatoes-and-rye content is that those were materials which were traditionally available enough for distillation purposes in Poland. In Russia the preferred substance has always been wheat, when it was possible to get enough of it.

In America, vodka was primarily a curiosity as late as World War II. The change after that was largely due to the efforts of one company: Smirnoff. The Smirnov family were the vodka barons of Russia in the late 1800s, among other things being the official supplier to the Tsar. Then came the Russian Revolution. One member of the family was, in essence, handed the brand, the recipe, and the ready cash and told to flee the country and try to start the vodka elsewhere. After a number of efforts he ended up building the business in France. The American rights were bought by the Heublein people in the late 1930s. After the war, they turned serious efforts to marketing. The product was originally billed here as "Smirnoff White Whiskey: No Smell. No Taste." which is a curious, if honest, pitch and should give you an idea of where vodka stood in the American mind back then. Celebrity ads - Woody Allen for the Moscow Mule, anyone? - and good slogans ("It leaves you breathless"), plus the beginnings of the decline of gin, raised Smirnoff's fortunes - and general awareness of vodka. In the 1980's the merger fit began, and when the dust had settled, Smirnoff was a property of Diageo, making it technically a British product these days.

I believe Smirnoff is still the number-one vodka in the world, but the most common vodka in America among my peers - at least, to judge from its name recognition and the number of people who pour it as their default - is not Russian, nor Polish, nor from any of the traditional "vodka nations." It is a Swedish product and is therefore from an "aquavit nation": Absolut. (Aquavit is discussed below.)

Flavored vodkas may actually be older than plain vodka. Like gin, the original use for vodka was "medicinal," and some people believe this proto-vodka must have been flavored with various herbs. Although many vodka makers have reintroduced lines of flavored vodkas in recent years, these are sometimes created by adding flavoring oils to plain vodka, which I believe is a less subtle and less interesting way of doing it. The real thing involves either adding a flavoring to the distillation (as with gin), or steeping a flavoring in the vodka for an extended time. Probably the oldest traditional vodka flavoring still around today (although hard to find in this country) is zubrowka (sometimes with a V instead of a W), or buffalo grass (bison grass). Wyborowa and Grasovka are brand names for buffalo-grass vodkas. Krupnik is a Polish style of honey-flavored vodka. Most other flavored vodka, although the name may vary with the maker, is labelled in an obvious way as to its flavoring, often with a picture. You might not be able to remember that Pertsovka is the Stolichnaya brand of pepper vodka, but the pepper pods depicted on the label will remind you.

Since flavored vodkas sometimes impinge on gin territory - there is a vodka flavored with juniper berries, for example, and how that makes it a vodka and not a gin, I couldn't tell you - this seems like a good place to mention flavored gins. Although one of my bar guides lists several, the only one I have ever actually seen sold and used is sloe gin, which is sometimes filed/shelved under liqueurs because most recipes for it have a substantial amount of sugar. The sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn and is basically a small wild plum. Sloe gin gets harder and harder to find, but like other flavored gins or vodkas, it is easy enough to make (assuming you have enough sloes on hand).

Two oddities to look out for when buying import vodka are "starka" (old vodka) and "krepkaya" (strong vodka). A "starka" vodka is aged in wood, and will probably be flavored, traditionally with wine or brandy, maybe with other things as well. A "krepkaya" vodka will be overproof, probably 110°. Beware!

A Note, Honey

At this point I'd like to add a word about mead, although it is not a hard spirit, doesn't belong on this page, and these pages don't otherwise discuss wines or beers.

I'm inserting it here because, in the first version of this essay, I described Krupnik (above) as tasting like a strong mead, and a reader did not let that stand:

Actually, mead tastes very little like honey, per se. At least the mead I make, which is dry. The honeyed vodka tastes more like the crap that's sold as "Meade" by Bunratty (among others), which is nothing but neutral grain spirits, water, and honey. Proper dry sparkling mead is more like champagne, with floral overtones from the flowers the honey was made from, and proper sweet mead has some of the sweetness, but is probably closer in character to a riesling than honeyed vodka.

Personally, I have had a British-made beerlike mead (whose brand I forget), which I agree did not taste especially like honey, but more like a "gruit" (an unhopped proto-beer); I have had a Finnish sima, which is a moderately fizzy honey-and-lemon beverage; and I have had quite a lot of tej - Ethiopian honey wine. Tej is mostly what I was comparing Krupnik to in my head, but in retrospect I agree that this comparison is spurious too.

The point of this digression is that apparently the term "mead" encompasses a lot of different things, and while I can't do the topic more justice than that here, be aware that one man's mead is another man's poison. (Pardon me.)

Aquavit

Aquavit is the spirit of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (and some would add Finland, but the Finns often prefer vodka). Unlike some of the other spirits discussed in these pages, for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to have spread much beyond its homelands - yet.

The word "aquavit" is a contraction of "aqua vitae" - water of life. This is the same principle that gives us the word "whiskey" (uisce beatha, from Gaelic).

Aquavit, like gin, is a neutral spirit that takes a second distillation with a variety of aromatics, and what juniper is to gin, caraway is to aquavit. While an aquavit may be flavored with any number of other things, most sources say that caraway is requisite. The next most common additives seem to be cumin and dill, both of which strike me as a bit odd, but I suspend judgement until someone hands me dill-flavored aquavit to try. As with gin, every manufacturer has their own secret recipe of aromatics; no two brands are exactly alike, although there is a certain similarity.

The Scandinavians, as far as I can tell, don't mix aquavit with anything - they take it ice-cold, straight, and in small shots. They do seem to often take it with a beer chaser (and that would be a pilsner-style beer).

There seem to be a higher number of aged aquavits than the other two white spirits. One particular type of aquavit, linie aquavit, is named for the "line" of the Equator, and is allowed to roll around in barrels in the holds of ships which travel from Norway to Australia and back before it is sold. If you manage to find some of it in this country, you will probably see the travel itinerary of that particular batch on the back label, with the dates of its long ocean voyage.

Brown Grain Spirits: The Whisk(e)ys, including Bourbon, Scotch, and Rye

Although a single-malt scotch and an American sour mash bourbon are as different as night and day, in fact this is an area where little differences in process make big differences in taste - and although it might offend the purists, these whisk(e)ys are, to me, all one big happy family.

In contrast to the white spirits, these are always sold after a period of aging in wood. They are all "whisk(e)y" (with an E in America and Ireland, without in Canada and Scotland - I'm just going to use the E from here on), but there are several useful subdivisions of "whiskey" to be aware of.

Unfortunately, to answer questions like "Why doesn't whiskey from Scotland taste like whiskey from Ireland?" or "Why is bourbon sweeter-tasting than other whiskeys?" it's necessary to go into some detail (hopefully not painful detail) about the way these spirits are made.

Little Things Mean A Lot

The two most important distinguishing factors in whiskeys are use of the pot still vs the continuous or column still, and the nature of the raw ingredients.

The pot still is just a larger version of the standard distillation apparatus known to mad scientists, moonshiners, and amateurs the world over: a cooking vessel, a catch vessel, and a coiled tube connecting the two. Pot stills leave a lot of impurities in the result, so much so that one of the skills needed to be a distiller is knowing how to catch the middle portion of the run - the first and last parts of the batch being distilled contain too many impurities and taste bad. But this also means that pot stills produce a substance with a lot of flavor, for better or worse.

The continuous still has two long columns that are connected such that the distillate can cycle through this more than once, if I understand it correctly (and I may not). The point is that a continuous still can produce a large amount of very pure alcohol very quickly. This makes it ideal for high-output industrial production, and not so good for flavor. In fact it's hard to produce anything but nearly-neutral alcohol in a column still.

With grain whiskey made in a continuous still, the ingredients don't matter so much; the product is too pure (see the discussion of flavor in the vodka section). Corn makes a slightly sweeter product and is one reason that American straight bourbons (which are made at least 51% percent from corn - see below) are sweeter than other whiskeys. Malted barley (this means barley that has been allowed to germinate, a cue to convert some of its starches into sugars) makes a definite difference in flavor. (More on this below.)

Single malt whiskeys are made exclusively from malted barley in pot stills. In Scotland, the barley is dried over peat fires in such a way that it adds smokiness to the product; in Ireland, even when peat is used, the smokiness is not present (or certainly not to the same degree). This, plus water differences and aging differences, is why Irish single malts (when they exist - see below) don't taste like Scots ones.

Flavor is a very idiosyncratic thing. To my mind, water, peat/smoke, and malt level are the main things which make various wheat whiskeys taste different. (With rye whiskeys and corn whiskeys, I can definitely taste that a different grain is involved.) Yet none of these things can explain some of the oddball flavors in scotches which you'll see a little further on. Not only do no two single malts taste alike, but some distillers of single malts claim that no two stills in their line create identical product. (They are allowed to mix various batches for consistency, as long as they were all made at the same distillery, and still call it a "single malt.")

Single malts are the proto-whiskeys, and we'll let the Irish and Scots slug it out over who got there first. The problem is that these products are strongly flavored, so much so that they are challenging to some drinkers. So single malts, until fairly recently, never had a strong following outside of their home countries.

What brought whiskey to the rest of the world was the development of blended whiskeys, which are made from a large portion of continuous-still grain whiskey (possibly with a certain amount of malted barley in that recipe, possibly not), mixed with small amounts of one or more single-malts. This makes a milder, more accessible whiskey; it enables the manufacturer to follow a recipe and produce a large amount of consistent product (single-malts are always somewhat limited in production, simply because of the way they're made); and it enables the whiskey to be made more cheaply. Single-malt afficionados would also say it makes bland whiskey, but be that as it may, blended whiskies still comprise the overwhelming majority of the international whiskey market. Some blended scotches you will see in the average store: Ballantine's, Chivas Regal, Cutty Sark, Dewar's, J & B, Johnnie Walker.

Most Irish whiskeys are now made in a combination of pot and column stills, with the proportion of malt and the exact sequence of distillations being proprietary to that brand. Although there are still some Irish single malts, presumably made entirely in pot stills, being sold, I've only ever seen one for sale in this country (Bushmills single malt). I'm told there are others I haven't found yet (including Red Breast). Other, non-single-malt Irish whiskeys you might see are Bushmills' other varieties, Jameson's, and Tullamore Dew.

Canadian whiskeys are always blends, as far as I know, and unlike the Scots or Irish product, may contain rye as one of the grains involved. Canadian whiskeys are higher than many other whiskeys in the proportion of neutral grain alcohol, which makes them typically light-bodied (and some would say bland). Crown Royal and Canadian Club are the best-known examples in America of this lot.

American blended whiskeys are not very common - my bar book lists only one, Seagram's 7 Crown, and I had thought that was Canadian. Most American whiskeys of note are straight whiskeys, an unblended product made in a continuous still from at least 51 percent of a single grain. In bourbon this grain is corn; in rye whiskey it is, yes, rye. A "sour mash" bourbon is one where the mash residue from the previous distillation is used as a sort of fermentation starter for the next distillation. This makes the product more consistent and also a little bit sweeter. A label is not required to note this, and most of the bourbons which don't claim "sour mash" explicitly use this process anyway. Bourbon is also required by law to age at least two years in new oak casks which have been charred on the inside. These casks can only be used once for bourbon - after which they are generally sold to winemakers, or distillers of other kinds, for their aging. Maker's Mark, Ancient Age, Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Old Grand-Dad, I.W. Harper, Old Forester, et al are all in this category.

I should add here that a reader indicated he had learned at the Jameson's distillery in Dublin that:

Bourbon is (traditionally) distilled once in a pot-still .... Bourbons don't exclusively use pot-stills anymore, but rather use a pot-still for the first stage (bringing it from 9% to about 20% alcohol) and then a "doubler" which is a column still to get to 50% alcohol, which is barrel proof. That's then aged, blended, diluted and bottled.

Unfortunately this contradicts other materials I had obtained which insist that bourbon (with the possible exception of some premium brands) is typically made in column stills all the way. On the other hand, knowing what comes out of column stills, I'm willing to believe this for flavor reasons. Clearly more research is called for.

Tennessee bourbons are, additionally, filtered through charcoal after aging, which is supposed to make the product smoother. Jack Daniel's and George Dickel are Tennessee bourbons.

Recent years have produced a number of "small batch" or "single-barrel" bourbons. These are excellent, but don't be fooled by the hype. There are plenty of well-aged, high-quality straight bourbons that come up to the quality of these small-batch products (notably Maker's Mark). Some small-batch bourbons (all good): Booker's, Baker's, Basil Hayden's, Knob Creek, and Woodford Reserve. (Watch out for Booker's, which comes straight from the barrel - unfiltered and undiluted - and is therefore very strong, overproof, between 121° and 127° by batch.)

Rye whiskey has been sliding out of popularity for many decades, but you might be able to find a bottle of Old Overholt if you want to try it. Rye whiskey, if labelled as such, must always be a straight whiskey.

A Smattering of Single Malts

In the last few years Americans have been engaged in a slow and steady rediscovery of single-malt scotches. It's an expensive but rewarding hobby. Single malts, as noted, are very idiosyncratic. The way they are aged, the type of barrel used in aging, the water used to make them, the source of the barley, the length of the peat firing, whether the still has a dent in it, and whether it was made on an alternate Tuesday with the moon full - all of these things may or may not make a difference in the flavor of a single malt.

However, without writing a book on the subject (because one already exists - see the last page), it's possible to make a few broad generalizations:

- Scotches from the eastern highlands are likely to have heather flavors or floral flavors, if they are in the mild, light style of Glenfiddich, Glen Grant, et al.

- Scotches from the eastern highlands are likely to have fruit or wine flavors if they are in the big, heavy style of Macallan or Aberlour.

- Scotches from the western highlands and the north and northwestern islands (Orkneys, Skye) are likely to have peppery or spicy flavors. Examples: Talisker, Glenmorangie.

- Scotches from the island of Islay are likely to have flavors of peat and seaweed (or what a friend of mine calls "dirt, salt and iodine"). Examples: Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Bowmore. Oban, to my mind, is a Islay-style scotch which doesn't happen to be made on Islay.

- Campbelltown scotches (Glen Scotia) are salty and oily.

- Scotches from the lowlands are likely to have more obvious malt tastes because of the absence of other high notes, although some of them are noted for grassy or citrusy tastes.

If you are going to start on single malts and you are a bourbon drinker, or you like a sweeter drink, try Macallan, which has a pronounced sherry/caramel taste, or one of the port- or sherry-finished versions of Glenmorangie.

If you like blended scotches and you want to slip into single malts gradually, try Glen Grant or Glenfiddich, which are mild and accessible and may already taste familiar to you (Glen Grant is one of the single malts in the Chivas Regal blend, for example).

If you like spicy things try Talisker, which is the closest a malt-based distillate will ever get to the adjective "peppery."

If you like salty things try a mild Islay-style scotch, such as Oban or Bowmore, but watch out for Laphroaig, which is difficult even for some afficionados to get near.

If you like smokiness, but not the Islay kind of dirty-peat smokiness, find a bottle of Highland Park.

Remember that the same scotch may come in several different ages. Macallan, for example, commonly sells an 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, sometimes a 15-year-old, and about every two or three years an 18-year-old. Older, rarer, and more expensive bottlings exist as well. In general, though "better" is subjective, the older a scotch is, the smoother, more complex, darker-colored, richer-tasting, and more expensive it will be.

Scotch does not mix well - not even the blended kind. You might take a blended scotch with carbonated water (i.e. scotch and soda), but I personally wouldn't mix a single malt with anything except possibly an ice cube. Bourbon mixes a little bit better than the other whiskeys, but if you have a really good bourbon and you add cola to it, why bother getting a really good bourbon? In general, with the spirits in this category, my principle is to buy quality and then learn to drink them straight, or slightly diluted, or not drink them at all.

The Tropicals: Tequila, Rum, Cachaça, Mezcal, and Arak

What the spirits in this category have in common is that they are distillates of unusual things, and they all originated in hot climates. Rum and tequila also have a common factor in that the aged, select versions and the young versions are so unalike in tastes and uses that they might as well be separate products.

Rum

Rum is distilled from either whole sugar cane juice or molasses. Molasses is essentially what's left over from cane juice after the parts sellable as sugar have been boiled out. For this reason, historically, most rum has been made from molasses - the idea being that you had a sugar refinery which then fed its leftovers to the rum distillery next door. However, these days the sugar cane market is not so great, so the economic penalties for turning the whole juice into rum are less severe.

There are many ways that rum manufacturers vary their product in a proprietary manner, making each rum unique. They can choose how much of the leavings from the previous batch - their equivalent of bourbon's "sour mash" - to add to the new brew; they can slow down the fermentation by controlling its temperature, which intensifies certain flavors; they can add flavorings such as cinnamon to the distillation; and so on.

But the biggest difference between rums is the use of the pot still vs the column still (see the discussion on the previous page). A pot-still rum is strongly flavored and idiosyncratic; a continuous-still rum is mild and comes closer to being a neutral spirit.

All rum must be aged. Light-colored rums are not necessarily aged for a shorter time than dark rums (although they generally are), but they are aged in something other than wood and therefore do not color. In general, light rums are mixing rums; dark but not long-aged rums, such as Myers' or Gosling's Black Seal (essential for mixing a "Dark and Stormy") are mixing rums for very specific situations that can handle their caramel/molasses taste; and long-aged rums are mostly for sipping straight.

Rum is associated very strongly with Central America and in particular its islands - the world center for rum is still the Greater and Lesser Antilles (which is to say, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti/Dominican Rep., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Barbados, and other flyspecks). Brazil makes a lot of rum, but their product is usually called cachaça, which follows in its own section.

The history of rum is, in a way, the history of Europeans in the Americas. Rum didn't exist as a spirit until the various European nations tried colonizing here - and running sugar cane plantations. Rum was spread worldwide through various nations' shipping to and from the New World - notably the English, as a leg in the notorious "triangle trade" (a notable exception to the distillery-next-to-refinery rule). Rum, in fact, has been associated strongly with British sailors throughout its history - but then, so has gin, so clearly Old Grogram's worry about his men was justified.

Old Grogram was the nickname of Admiral Edward Vernon, who habitually wore a grogram (or grogham) coat, raw silk and wool that had been waterproofed. Vernon was concerned because the enshrined naval "alcohol ration" of a half-pint (usually of strong, cheap rum) often made the sailors unruly, but any attempts to remove or reduce that ration would probably bring rebellion. So Vernon cut the rum heavily with water, plus lime juice to prevent scurvy and some sugar to cut the bitterness. As one site notes, "Old Grogram had invented the world's first rum cocktail." (Probably not quite accurate. The mixture of "strong, weak, sour, and sweet" is as old as rum itself, and in some parts of the Antilles even today if you order a "rum punch" they put water, rum, syrup, and limes in front of you and let you do the mixing.) Anyway, this is the origin of "grog," which is slang for any diluted booze mixture, but especially rum.

By the by, the British Navy officially ceased the policy of the grog ration in 1970.

Despite its spread, rum prior to the 1900s was considered a rough, low-class beverage, and it often was. In "The Adventure of Black Peter" by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1904 and set in 1895, Sherlock Holmes makes a point of noting that a sailor would drink rum preferentially over whiskey or brandy, but any landlubber would vote the opposite way. Most of the popularity and awareness of rum since that time can be attributed, in whole or part, to the Bacardi family.

The Bacardi company began in 1862 as an attempt by the family patriarch, Don Facundo, to make rum a tamer and more consistent beverage. Among other things the Bacardi literature claims he was the first to filter rum through charcoal to remove impurities. He also aged rum in oak barrels, although he was probably not the first to do that. At any rate, the Bacardi product was indeed superior. It was milder than most of the idiosyncratic island rums being produced, but this was not considered a disadvantage.

Bacardi grew and for a long time the name was synonymous with a certain style of rum. As late as 1931, when Charles Baker published his book of booze adventures and recipes, The Gentleman's Companion, he takes pain to call out Bacardi by name as "light brandy-type rums, [as opposed to] Barbados, St. Croix, Haitian, or Demerara rum, which are the darker, medium type, [or] Jamaican, the dark, richly flavored type ...." The Daiquiri is a drink which originated with Bacardi rum, and it is best still made with a light-type rum.

The Bacardi family fled Cuba for the Bahamas when Castro came to power (with no love lost - the Bacardi site says "On October 14, 1960, after 98 years of existence in Cuba, the Cuban assets [of the company] were illegally confiscated by Cuba's totalitarian regime," and the Bacardi company has allegedly given money to various anti-Castro projects over the years), and proceeded with business as usual. Today Bacardi is made in a number of places all over the world; Bacardi rum for American consumption is usually from Puerto Rico. (The company itself is still based in the Bahamas.) The Bacardi company (which owns a lot more than just rum) is a behemoth - Bacardi white rum is the single biggest-selling spirit in the world, and the company is the largest privately held spirits maker. (The Bacardi management has wanted to take the company public several times but the deal has always fallen through for various reasons. They will surely try again in the near future, so this text may be obsolete.)

Although the use of dark vs. light mixing rums is subjective and depends on how prevalent you want the rum taste to be in the finished beverage, the category of añejo or aged rums is a special case. Although all rum is aged, these are aged for quite a while and are meant to be drunk straight. A rum which makes an explicit age claim on its bottle is probably meant to be a sipping rum. Americans seem to be discovering these in recent years, similar to the revived interest in single-malt scotches. Many rum makers make nearly identical-looking lines, so note the difference carefully between, say, the normal Appleton Estates rum and their older varieties, including a 21-year-old. If you do forget to look at the bottle closely you will surely get an interesting surprise from the price tag! The rule of more age = more price = more complexity is just as stern here as it is with single malts. Even Bacardi makes a sipping rum - it's called Bacardi 8 and it is a good way to try a sipping rum which will not break the bank too badly.

Charles Baker felt a need to warn readers about the Demerara rums, and that warning stands today - these days a "Demerara" rum will likely come from Guyana, and they have a tendency to be bottled at very high proofs. If you run into one of these, be sure you know what you are getting.

A reader pointed out an oddity I wanted to note here: "As a footnote, there's Stroh's brand rum, made in Austria, from sugar-beets (at 80° and 120°). It's dark and thick like Myers', but because it uses beets rather than cane, has something of a butter-rum flavor."

Cachaça

Cachaça (ka-SHA-sa) is classified by some of my books and some websites as a "sugar-cane brandy." To me a brandy is a spirit distilled from wine, but the term "brandy" (and even more so the term "aguardente" or "aguardiente") has been slung around pretty loosely over the years. As far as I can tell - and I have done a lot of looking to try to pin this down - if you hear of "aguard(i)ente" with no other qualifier in Portugal or Spain, it is likely to be an actual brandy, from wine (which will be covered in the next section). If you hear of it with no other identifier in South America it is likely to be cachaça. You will also see some oddball ones with identifiers - for example "aguard(i)ente de medronho" is made from the fruits of the arbutus tree in the southernmost parts of Portugual. "Aguard(i)ente de caña" is the sugar-cane kind.

At any rate, I'm not sure what makes cachaça a brandy at all. It's not a higher proof than other rum, it's not distilled differently from other rum - so as far as I'm concerned it's Brazilian rum. There is one important difference, though: Cachaça is not made from molasses, but whole cane juice. It may or may not be aged enough to turn dark, but Pitú, the brand you are most likely to find in this country, is a light-colored and relatively light-tasting variety. (It's the one with the black label with the red shrimp.)

The only reason you might want to find cachaça is to make a proper Caipirinha ... but between you and me, I think you can substitute a good light rum and you won't even notice (in which case it is only a slight variation on a Mojito). I'm told that a fine, aged cachaça is worth sipping straight, but I have never seen one for sale in this country.

Tequila/Mezcal

Tequila and mezcal are the spirits of Mexico. Mezcal is more or less the generic term for all the distillates of the agave plant. Tequila, these days, is a protected term that can only be used for a booze made from a specific plant in a specific region of Jalisco.

When Charles Baker wrote his book (see above), mezcal was enough of an oddity that it was known in America only to those few who lived near the border or had adventured south of it. He felt it necessary to write a few paragraphs to explain the beverage to the uninitiated, and I can't improve on them:

Tequila, along with Pulque and Mescal, make up the three national beverages. Pulque is the universal drink, mainly for the average person of average position. It is the fermented sap of the Maguey plant - which we call a century plant - and made by chopping out the central bud, or flower stalk so that the sap can collect in the scooped out heart of the plant itself .... Pulque is about as strong as beer, tastes like a combination of sour cider and whatever fermented fruit juice happens to be around, and smells - as has been told - faintly like a mildewed donkey. Needless to say it is not universally consumed by others than the hardy race in the land of its conception.

Mescal is the distilled fermented juice of the Agave or Maguey plant. The plant is dug up, leaves amputated, and [the core] roasted. The juice is then extracted in a press, fermented and distilled. It is the same color as our corn likker, has the same kick, plus an odd flavour which cannot be described.

Tequila is the finest of these three, being the distilled fermented juice of the Zotol Maguey plant, which grows almost entirely in the State of Jalisco. Properly aged it is a spirit of definite merit. It is very potent, colorless also, and has a strange exotic flavor which - like Holland gin - is an acquired taste.

To this I would only add that the recent years have seen more and more of the very high-end añejo tequilas, which are aged in wood - and therefore turn gold or brown. (But watch out; caramel coloring is not unheard of.) These aged tequilas are to be sipped and they are a very different experience from the young, white stuff.

It's very difficult to mix tequila harmoniously - even Baker noted that he and his cronies went on a "hunt for some way to mix tequila." The basic cocktails they came up with are all some variation on the formula of tequila plus lime, and something vaguely orangey, plus possibly a little sweetener. Baker didn't know about the Margarita, but he anticipated it.

Arak

Arak is a generic term for a number of vegetable distillates throughout what used to be called by westerners the Far East. Unfortunately the name (which may be from the Arabic for "juice") is possibly too generic - and has come to be applied mostly to yet another variety of the "anisette family" of sweet spirits (i.e. along with ouzo, pastis, raki, and so forth). While the genuine arak might be flavored with anise (since flavorings have historically varied as widely as the raw materials), the arak I refer to here is basically a sort of rum - it has been made, at times, from rice, millet, dates, and whatever else was handy in the Chinese and Indonesian regions that are its home. (And possibly other places: I am assured by a friend whose husband is Bulgarian that in Bulgaria "arak" refers to whatever local rotgut they can brew up.) Generally sugar or molasses was added before distillation, hence the rum similarities. In the Indonesian areas, palm wine (AKA palm toddy - a liquor made by fermenting palm sap) is sometimes added to it or distilled into it.

Palm wine, as a reader pointed out, is a very common spirit in the poorer parts of the world wherever palms can be tapped. Palm wine that has not been distilled is apparently about as much of an acquired taste for non-natives as pulque (although presumably it is sweeter).

A Balinese site I found says:

Arak is a Balinese liquor which is distilled from tuak, a sweet wine made from the coconut palm flower. Tuak is about 5% alcohol. Good arak can contain over 50%. Some arak is distilled from brem, which is a wine made from black glutinous rice and coconut milk. A bottle of arak costs about 20,000 rupiahs, which is about US$1.00. Please don't confuse this product with the arak that's the Turkish national drink. That tastes a lot like ouzo. Balinese arak tastes like arak.

Unless you get an arak of this sort, though - which seems unlikely outside of Indonesia or Thailand these days - what you will get is an anise-flavored liquor. For more on those, see the liqueurs section.

Fruit Distillates, including Brandies of All Sorts

Brandy proper is a shortening of "brandywine" (AKA brannwein, brandewijn) which literally means "burned wine." I think of brandy as being purely a distillate of wine made from grapes, but the term is often used more loosely than that, and many of the other fruit distillates mentioned in this section are referred to as brandies.

Brandies tend to be made in regions that grow grapes which produce a wine that is thin and harsh and unsuitable for drinking; by distilling it, commerce is salvaged. The two parts of France where this applies are the Cognac and Armagnac regions. Cognac is a town on the Charente river, north of Bordeaux, in the Poitou-Charente district, and Armagnac is made in certain parts of Gascony east of Toulouse. These terms are both protected, and the French get very unhappy at anyone using "cognac" as a generic.

The Charente growing areas are further subdivided into six divisions, which I won't bother to list here; suffice to say that "champagne" (open fields) on a Cognac label indicates what they consider to be a better growing area than the "bois" (woods). It has nothing to do with the sparkling wine made in the Champagne region. In general, though, you are not likely to see any of the region terms because Cognac is primarily sold through the large firms which mature, blend, and sell it - and Cognac is always blended, often from many sources, so the manufacturer can establish a consistent taste and identity for their brand from year to year.

Cognac is distilled in pot stills and aged in oak for a minimum of two years and generally longer - sometimes much longer. The age will generally be indicated on the label in some way, but unfortunately these terms are used differently by every manufacturer. In general VS or VSP (very special, very special pale) is younger than VSOP (very special old pale) or VO (take a guess), which is in turn younger than Extra, XO, or Napoléon.

Armagnac is still not incredibly common in this country, and unlike Cognac, you may actually find a region designation on the bottle, in which case Bas (low) Armagnac is considered more desirable than Haut (high) Armagnac. Armagnac is blended, like Cognac, but unlike Cognac can occasionally carry a vintage year (implying that all the substances in that blend are from wines of the same year). To indicate normal age they use the same inconsistent system of abbrevations as Cognac. Armagnac is often richer than Cognac, but lacks subtlety - or so I am told. I use both types only occasionally when cooking and do not find them an interesting beverage.

Brandies are made in any number of other countries, and some of them are very good. Spanish brandy tends to run slightly sweet and is usually made by the same large firms that make sherries (which are on the next page). Some of them make their brandies by the same solera method used for sherry. Portuguese brandy, as discussed in the cachaça section, is called aguardente. It is typically aged in port casks because, similarly, its commercial producers are mostly in the business of making port (next page). In South America "aguardente" is generally used to mean cachaça, and the brandy of Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia is instead called pisco. The Greeks make a product called Metaxa, which is unusual among wine brandies because it is made from red grapes, and it is flavored. The Germans mostly label their brandies as Weinbrand these days, which is a protected term in the EU, with various restrictions on where the component wines can have originated.

Two spirits that are not quite a wine brandy and not quite a fruit distillate are marc (don't pronounce the C) and grappa. The former is French, the latter Italian, but both are distilled from the parts of grapes left behind after they are pressed to make wine. Waste not want not. Mostly you get the sloppy seconds you would expect. I have heard that some grappas can be very good, and some are even aged and all the rigamarole, but the ones I have tried are like normal brandies but harsher and thinner, and I am not so infatuated with brandy that I want to go out of my way to drink its poor relation.

I prefer the term eau-de-vie for a spirit distilled from fruits. (In case you are utterly without French, that's just "water of life" again.) Eaux-de-vie can be made from fermented fruit mash, or the fruits can be added to a neutral spirit and then redistilled (the gin method). The latter becomes the required method if making an eau-de-vie from a fruit which doesn't contain enough sugar to ferment on its own.

The best known eau-de-vie has its own name: Calvados. Once again this is a protected term and applies to an apple eau-de-vie (or if you must, an apple brandy) made in a certain section of Normandy. Actually, I'm more willing to call Calvados a brandy than some other non-wine brandies because it is made from thin cider (thus paralleling the idea of "distilled from a beverage you couldn't sell as is"). It has useless age abbreviations like Cognac, and it even has its own marc - marc de pommes - made from the leftover parts of the apple after the juice is pressed.

When apple eau-de-vie (eau-de-vie de pommes) is made in the United States, which it rarely is these days, it is called "applejack," and in the Spanish-spoken world it will likely be labeled "aguardiente di sidre," possibly with spelling variations. Applejack has a bad reputation from years of being basically moonshine, but a current good brand is Laird's. While it is not Calvados, it is very tasty and not nearly so expensive.

Poire Williams is the most famous kind of pear eau-de-vie (eau-de-vie de poires), and certain varieties of it have that oh-so-tempting whole pear in the bottle. By the by, Americans, the reason you do not recognize the Williams pear is because we are just about the only nation that doesn't call it that. We call it the Bartlett.

Kirschwasser (often abbreviated to just "kirsch") is made from cherries. Its ancestral home is the Black Forest region of Germany. The French further distinguish between eau-de-vie de cerises (sweet cherries) and eau-de-vie de girottes (sour cherries). Although the French recognize eau-de-vie de prunes, made from plums, the most famous plum eaux-de-vie are the ones which go by the collective name of slivovitz (spellings vary), throughout the regions which were once called Yugoslavia. "Quetsch" is a less common word for the same thing, a German term found mostly in the Alsace region.

Berries are generally steeped in neutral spirits to make eaux-de-vie because of their lack of sugar. Names you may see in French are framboise (raspberry), fraise (strawberry), and cassis (blackcurrant).

And of course there are plenty of oddities, eaux-de-vie made from juniper berries or from mirabelles or quinces or the strange fruit of the arbutus tree (see the cachaça section), but in general this is more than enough information about fruit spirits, which, once you get beyond Calvados and kirsch, seldom seem to be consumed in this country at all.

A reader notes that the generic term "schnapps" as heard in Central Europe will often mean eaux-de-vie as opposed to brandies or liqueurs. He comments that in Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia the "bauerschnapps" (farmer's schnapps, i.e. homemade-style) can be "up to 150° or so" and is "jet fuel .... Generally tasteless as it's going down (think Everclear), but then the fruit aftertaste kicks in, and the only way I know of to wash that aftertaste away is with another shot. You see the problem here ...."

Fruit distillates other than ones made from apples are typically not aged in wood, and therefore will be colorless no matter how long they have aged.

Before and After Dinner: Fortified Wines (including Vermouth) and Liqueurs

Fortified wines are wines which have been mixed with another alcohol (brandy, by which I mean brandy made from grape wines). Sherry, port, and Madeira are aged/matured after the brandy is added. Vermouth is different; it is not aged, and in addition to the brandy, it is steeped with a proprietary mix of herbs and aromatics. It probably also has some sweetener added (even dry vermouth). Sherry, port, and Madeira are all protected terms, applying only to products made in very specific ways in very specific places.

Sherry

For sherry, the region is a triangle marked by three towns in the far south of Spain, in Andalusia. One of these towns, Jerez de la Frontera, bears the name that was corrupted to "sherry." Sherry is made by a very strange process. The fermented juice is moved to wooden casks that are not quite filled. This is to allow the formation of a thick yeast scum, called flor, on the top. The wine itself chooses what sort of sherry it will be - barrels that get a thick flor will be finos or dry sherries, barrels that develop little or none are destined to be olorosos or sweet sherries.

The wines are fortified and aged for a period of time in these barrels, which varies by type - olorosos get more heavily fortified, which kills any flor, and age for a longer period. Then the new sherry becomes part of a solera, the method sherry makers use to blend their product. A solera is a stack of barrels in long rows, possibly three or four rows high, with the oldest barrels at the bottom. Wine is only ever drawn for bottling from the bottom row, and the barrels are never entirely emptied. Each barrel is then refilled from the one above it, and the highest barrels are refilled from the new sherry. In this way any bottle of sherry contains a mixture of many wines, some of which could be very old.

Manzanilla sherry is a type of fino, light and somewhat bitter. Amontillado is a special fino which has been given a second maturation after the solera blending, giving it a different flavor. Finos in general are easy to drink, make a lovely aperitif or a companion to many rich soups. They do not keep. Finos are ready to drink when you buy them and will not store for too long, even unopened. Once opened, they really should be drunk all at once, certainly within a few days.

Olorosos are less fragile, but still should be consumed, once opened, within a few weeks. Cream sherries are olorosos which have had a sweet wine added to them. They are sweeter than other olorosos but should be handled the same way.

All sherries prefer to be stored in cool, dark places.

Port

Port is named for the country of Portugal itself, although it was popularized and basically invented by the British. The wines that become port are made in a restricted area of northern Portugal in a fifty-mile area along the Douro River. Most port is made by large (and generally still British) port firms, who maintain enormous aging cellars there. The cellar master knows how sweet he wants his product to be and stops the fermentation of the wine at a selected point by adding extremely high-proof brandy to the mixture. The earlier this happens, the sweeter the product.

Port takes a fair amount of aging - several years in cask, with the exception of vintage port, which is intended to undergo a fair amount of its aging after bottling. A port maker may choose to declare a vintage port if he feels he has exceptional grapes that year; not all port firms declare the same vintages. Unless a port bears a vintage, you can assume it is a blend of various ports from different years. "Late bottled vintage" is a vintage port, but one which does most of its maturing in cask and is therefore ready to drink when bottled. "Crusted port," on the other hand, is a non-vintage port which is bottled early, finishing its maturation in bottle.

Any port which does most of its maturing in bottle throws a deposit or "crust" of sediment. This is why vintage ports are often marked with a white splash of paint, showing which side of the bottle was kept on top during shipping and storage. Even if the bottle is kept in one orientation most of its life and not jostled, it needs to be decanted before serving so as to leave the sediment in the bottle. It is not unusual to store an unopened vintage port for twenty-plus years, (eight to ten would be considered a minimum), and it will probably improve for much of that time. However, once it is opened, it should be drunk within a few days, if not immediately.

Tawny ports age in cask for a very long time, possibly twenty or more years, and when they emerge they are a gold color and not tremendously sweet. While an excellent tawny port is not cheap, they are not usually so exorbitant as a vintage port, and are a possibly-achievable treat for those of us who can't take out second mortgages easily to try a vintage model.

Madeira

Madeira is made on the island of Madeira, far to the southwest of Portugal. Madeira takes part of the way it is made from port (the maker decides when to stop the fermentation by adding a sharp dose of alcohol), part from sherry (it is blended by the solera method), and adds one wrinkle of its own - Madeira is baked, literally, heated in special slow ovens for at least three months, which gives it its particular sweetness and aroma. After the baking the wine matures before solera for three or so years, and matures for at least eight years in cask after the solera. It may continue to improve even after bottling.

Madeira can, as far as I can tell, be kept unopened basically forever. If anyone has kept an unopened bottle of Madeira long enough for it to deteriorate, they must have had a long and sad life. Once opened, it does lose its flavor a bit, but not nearly as fast as port or sherry. Just remember that like these others, it prefers a cool dark place.

By the by, there are California fortified wines which are worth drinking (this was not, I am told, always the case). Several people have vouched for the increasing quality of California ports. I personally have had a California "Madeira" which I'd be willing to match against anything shipped from Funchal.

I am constitutionally opposed to mixing port, Madeira, or sherry with any other substances whatsoever. I also don't believe in drinking them chilled. Straight, undiluted, and at cool room temperature is the recipe.

Vermouth

Vermouth, on the other hand, I only use to mix, although there are plenty of people in France and Italy who drink it by itself as an aperitif. I've tried both dry and sweet vermouth alone and they're pleasant (dry vermouth has a fino sherry quality to it, and sweet vermouth has the dark meaty taste I associate with some ports), but I mostly think of them as ingredients.

If you are reading a recipe that calls for dry or sweet vermouth and you want to make sure you are buying the right kind, it is very simple: Dry vermouth is white and sweet vermouth is red. Furthermore every vermouth maker whose wares you're likely to see uses the same color code - dry has a green-accented label and sweet a red one. Some makers also sell an "extra-dry" vermouth, which I suppose you could use to make an extra-dry Martini. I am told there is such an animal as a white sweet vermouth; I'll believe it when I see it.

Are vermouths from different manufacturers interchangeable? Possibly not if you drink them straight; after all, each maker has their own formula. I haven't ever poured myself a shot of dry Noilly Prat and one of dry Martini & Rossi and compared them. We use Noilly Prat for Martinis because it seems to suit them, but when mixed with gin, I'm not sure I could tell you which vermouth brand went into the glass in a blind test. I use sweet vermouth mostly to mix with Campari or bourbon, and I don't think I could tell a difference there either.

Liqueurs

The big difference between liqueurs and any other spirit which essentially consists of flavorings steeped or distilled in neutral alcohol - which is to say, the difference between a liqueur and gin, or flavored vodka, or some eaux-de-vie - is sugar. Lots of it. Liqueurs, even the ones which are described as "bitter," are very sweet. People who do not like bitter liqueurs think they taste like cough syrup - cloying sweetness wrapped around a medicinal nastiness. People who do not like sweet liqueurs think it's like drinking corn syrup. Even if you like liqueurs, it is best, if drinking them straight, to take them in very small doses (in which case you may call them cordials). The bar role of liqueurs is more often as a flavoring in various mixed drinks.

Crèmes are the sweetest liqueurs by far, with at least a quarter of their content being sugar. If you see "crème de" something on a label, it is probably something too sweet even for a tiny sip in a cordial glass - but it may be something which really tastes great in a mixture with some other base spirit. Crèmes are also usually the lowest in alcohol of the liqueurs, generally no more than a quarter alcohol, which makes sense - if you have a higher percentage of sugar in the mix you have less room for alcohol, so to speak.

Liqueurs in general, some college-drinking myths to the contrary, are not usually amazingly alcoholic. Most of them only get as high as the standard 80° and are often lower. There are, however, a couple of exceptions, such as the deadly green variety of Chartreuse, which is 110°.

Because the biggest mystery about most liqueurs is figuring out "what the heck does this taste like, anyway, and does that artichoke on the Cynar bottle mean what I think it means?" I have listed a number of liqueur names here for your reference. But this is nowhere even close to a comprehensive list.

Herbal liqueurs contain proprietary blends of herbs and aromatics and their flavor usually can't be described easily, especially the grand old monastic liqueurs whose formulas have been around for ages, Chartreuse (which rhymes with "disclose," by the by, not "confuse") and Bénédictine. These you just have to try for yourself. Some brands of herbal liqueurs:

-Bénédictine (no longer made by Benedictine monks) is supposedly spicy in addition to herbal. A large number of its drinkers, once upon a time, preferred it cut fifty percent with brandy. When the makers found out about this, they started marketing B & B themselves.
- Chartreuse (still made by Carthusian monks) comes in the yellow (normal) and green (extra-strength) varieties; it is said to be flavored with 130 herbs.
- Calisay has cinchona bark as one of its flavors, which will give it a quinine taste.
- Certosa
- Fernet Branca
- Galliano (but see the anisées)
- Jägermeister
- Strega, whose color is said to come from saffron, and whose name means "witch"
- Izarra, which like Chartreuse comes in yellow and green danger levels
- Aperol, which at 22° is about the most harmless liqueur around
- Suze à la Gentiane, or just Suze, has gentian as its strongest flavor; gentian is also a flavor in Angostura bitters and in Moxie brand soda.

There are also a few hybrids with an herbal base but another strong, perhaps dominant flavor, notably:

- Campari, which tastes of bitter orange
- Cynar, which is flavored with herbs and, yes, artichoke
- Branca Menta, which is Fernet Branca with peppermint and, with the herb bitterness, probably tastes like mouthwash.

Liqueurs with more obvious flavorings, but ones which can't necessarily be told from their names (you can probably guess what Cherry Heering is flavored with, for example):

- Amaretto di Saronno is flavored with - you were going to say almonds, weren't you? Wrong. Apricot pits.
- Cointreau, Curaçao, Grand Marnier, and the generic "triple sec" are all orange liqueurs. The base for Grand Marnier is Cognac and some people, including myself, feel it tastes stronger/richer than Cointreau. True Curaçaos are only made in Curaçao, in the West Indies, from the dried peels of the sour oranges which grow there. But these are piddling distinctions, and a recipe which specifies only "triple sec" can probably be safely made with any of these, substitutions permitted, et cetera.
- Maraschino is not just a name for a sweet cherry preserved in syrup, but a sour cherry liqueur.
- Luxardo is also a cherry liqueur.
- With the crèmes, remember that "framboise" is raspberry, "fraises" are strawberries, "cassis" is blackcurrant, and "noisette" is hazelnut. Crème Yvette is the same as crème de violette, and yes, it is flavored with violets.
- Kahlúa is a coffee liqueur, which also has herb and vanilla flavors.
- Tia Maria is also a coffee liqueur, and its booze basis is basically cachaça.
- Advocaat is a Dutch liqueur containing egg yolks. It tastes like a very strong eggnog. Its basis is brandy.

Anisées is a generic term for all the various liqueurs with an anise/licorice flavor. There are a lot of these because every culture has at least one, and in addition to the various brand names (Pernod, Ricard) there are all sorts of generic names (ouzo, raki, pastis, anis, ojen, sambuca, and more). Some people make distinctions of sweetness between "anisette" and "anis," which may or may not hold up to scrutiny. Although I do not believe that "arak" should be used for liqueurs of this type (see the arak section), it generally is, so get used to seeing it used for this, especially in Turkey and the Middle East. For more discussion of these names, see this page, but take it with a grain of salt because it lists Galliano, which one of my books characterizes as herbal+vanilla, and others as just herbal, as an anisée.

Absinthe is in this category, although it has a complex mix of herbal flavors as well; the anise flavor tends to dominate anything else in the mix. Absinthe, of course, is banned in the US, ostensibly for containing wormwood (but see below). Herbsaint is the brand of an herbal/anise liqueur developed in New Orleans specifically as a substitute for absinthe (prior to its banning New Orleans had the vast bulk of US absinthe consumption). Another brand of more recent pedigree is Absente. The Wormwood Society would like you to know that it does not consider either of these acceptable substitutes for the real thing, but at least Absente does contain wormwood, after a fashion.

An additional note about absinthe is probably a good idea here since there is so much web misinformation floating around. First off, read that Wormwood Society FAQ. I link it because it is no-nonsense and I believe it tells the truth. I also hold to the theory that the problems which led to the 1915 ban were mostly because of "bathtub absinthe," as it were - that there were a lot of poorly-made products with nasty stuff in them, like antimony or copper compounds. Also, I don't for an instant believe that all vermouths sold in this country lack wormwood, although they may have it in a small enough quantity that the US government doesn't care (though the ban on thujone in alcohol is supposed to be utter and complete). The word "vermouth" itself comes from "wormwood" and unless any number of manufacturers make a special vermouth for sale to the US, I presume it's still in most vermouth recipes. Mind you, I'm not especially keen on anise-flavored drinks and I'm not going out of my way to find absinthe, but I hate all examples of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[As of 2008 or so, wormwood-containing absinthes have begun to come into the US again - presumably legally as some of them advertise publicly now - and I have not yet done the research to find out what changed in the laws.]

Now on to the final batch of liqueurs, the ones flavored with various whiskeys. Actually, it might be better to call these "flavored whiskeys" were it not for the requisite sugar content - in each case the whiskey is not just a component of the flavor, but the base alcohol. These are comparatively rare, but well-known:

- Bailey's (Irish Cream) is flavored with Irish whiskey and a little chocolate
- Drambuie is flavored with scotch and honey
- Irish Mist is flavored with herbs, Irish whiskey, and honey
- Southern Comfort is flavored with bourbon, orange, and peach - and, a reader notes, caramel (I always assumed the caramel taste came from the bourbon).

Some Books, Without Which (and a word about Wine and Beer)

This tract has been assembled mostly from information which was floating around in my head (plus a fair amount of web wandering), but my brain is notorious for storing many things and not knowing where to find any of them, so I am glad to have had a few useful books on hand as a guidepost. Without them this would be an even more incoherent mess than it already is.

The only bar guide I ever want in my house is American Bar by Charles Schumann (Abbeville Press, 1995). Schumann is a definite character who does things a particular way and is sure that is the one best way to do it, but his book is great. If you pick up this book and you see that the organization of this essay seems to mirror the organization of his back pages, this is because I used his structure as a memory aid to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything obvious. Highly recommended - if you can find it.

The exploits of Charles Baker are not just good recipes, good bar advice, and a slice of a different, bygone era, but also good reading in their own right. His Gentleman's Companion was reprinted in 1992 by Derrydale Press as Jigger, Beaker and Glass, and it is by that title that you should search for it.

I wouldn't have been able to talk about single-malt scotches to even the limited extent I have here without Michael Jackson's Complete Guide to Single Malt Scotch (Dorling Kindersley/Running Press, 4th ed, 1999). Ignore Jackson's point scores - even he says they are of limited utility; there are, I think, no outright bad single malts, just ones that don't have a taste you like. This is why his descriptions of scotch flavors, using wine-like adjectives, is useful. Grabbing what he means by some of the terms ("floral" in a scotch is a little trickier to make out than in a wine) takes time, but the book encourages effort, with tons of useful information and pictures of the labels so you can spot what you're looking for easily in the stores.

I didn't bother to list most names and brands of vodka styles because there are so many. If you are seriously into vodka, or would like to be, try to find yourself a copy of Classic Vodka by Nicholas Faith & Ian Wisniewski (Prion, 1997). This book was also vital for the vodka and Smirnoff history.

Finally, you will notice that wine and beer aren't covered here. Although I may have a Wine 101 or a Beer 101 in me someday, those topics are indeed essays in themselves, and big ones. Meanwhile, the potential wine enthusiast is urged to find a copy of Fear of Wine by Leslie Brenner (Bantam, 1995). At present I don't know of any general explanation of beers - perhaps beer needs less debunking in this country! If you know of a book that does for beer what I've attempted to do here for spirits, by all means call it to my attention.

Copyright © February 2007. All rights reserved.