Mixology Wine Institute Blog / Mixology Wine Instructor’s Meeting, October 2010: Drinking Italy

Text 18 Oct 1 note Mixology Wine Instructor’s Meeting, October 2010: Drinking Italy

Italian Drinking Culture:

Tuaca, an Italian Vanilla and Spice Liqueur marketed in the US to be the next Jagermeister, is made in a little town in Tuscany. It’s weird, because I was in Tuscany, for two weeks, in April, and nobody even knew what Tuaca was.

So much of our culinary and Mixology heritage comes from Italy, and so much of it has changed drastically. The effervescent crispiness of Pizza in Naples is completely different from almost any Pizza I’ve had anywhere but Lucali in New York. Stella in Philly is close, but not quite there. Coming back from Italy was weird for me, it was hard to recover from being around abundant, cheap, amazing food.

As different as food is, drinks are even more different. If you ask for a Martini, you’ll probably get Martini Bianco on ice, as an Apertif. Vermouth is an aromatized wine, and as shocking as it is for us to believe, wasn’t meant to “accompany” anything, but to stand on its own. People forget that Vermouth is WINE, but it is, and it should be refrigerated! I was at a bar on Sunday and I saw a bottle of Nolly Pratt premium vermouth sitting outside..What a waste!

Martini Bianco (hard to find but available in the US)

Culturally, Italy is very different from the US in its approach to alcohol. For one thing, the drinking age is almost non-existent. I passed a teeny bopper club in Siena where the average age couldn’t have been more over 15. You can buy anything anywhere, and drink it everywhere. Despite this, nobody seems to lose control when around alcohol, it’s interwoven so seamlessly into daily life, appreciated through habit, and ritual, that it loses its dangerous edge. It’s as if Italians love wine too much to drink too much of it.

When I went to Scholar’s a bar in Rome geared toward Americans abroad, it really drove the difference home. A lot of Americans were outside smoking, not realizing in Italy, smoking inside is just fine. We were also shockingly loud, which to be honest was refreshing. As civilized as Italians can be, I was feeling homesick and singing sweet home Alabama and arguing about football really with a bunch of other obnoxious loud Americans over Guinness hit the spot. It was the only bar with a huge bouncer, and he routinely and politely said “shhhhh” to the garrulous co-eds.

Italians, and central Europeans in general, seem obsessed with digestion. The light before dinner drink, the Apertivo, is followed by a dinner which almost invariably calls for wine. The principle difference between Old World and New World wine is that Old World Wine has the structure to stand up to food, while in the New World, we tend to drink wine on its own. After dinner comes the digestivo: a sweet, simple and strong like Limoncello, are used to aid digestion like a sorbet.

Another unique property of Italian drinking culture are the group of bitter drinks known as Amari. We know Campari from the Negroni, Fernet Branca has a reputation, but the most accessible of Amari is Aperol, a light, floral, low alcohol bitter which Jason Wilson describes as Campari’s hot younger sister.

My goal for this instructors meeting, was to create a before dinner drink and an after dinner drink that would be true to Italian origins but not…Boring. I didn’t want the instructors, some of whom drive more than an hour to get to these meetings, to be disappointed by a glass of Sweet Vermouth in front of them!

The Warm Up:

I wanted to make a drink that would be true to European drinking methodology, but interesting to Americans. Because this is a low alcohol drink designed to open the digestive system and start the night off, I called it the Warm Up. I wanted to use Aperol, the gentlest of Amari, and Lillet Blanc, the French Appertif wine made famous by its use in the Vesper martini a few years back. I wanted to make a drink following a Negroni template:

Equal Parts

A Sweet Ingredient (Sweet Vermouth)

A Bitten Ingredient (Campari)

A Neutral Ingredient (Gin)

And I ended up using St. Germain, an elderflower liqueur with such wonderful and ubiquitous accenting qualities that it’s been jokingly referred to as Bartender’s Ketchup.

I ended up with this:

1 oz. Aperol

1 oz. St. Germain

1 oz. Lillet Blanc

Stir and Strain into a Rocks glass filled with ice or a cocktail glass.

The drink went over really well, although a couple of the instructors had some trouble getting used to the bitterness of the Aperol.

Pumpkin Cognac Sazerac:

“Yeah, things didn’t work out the way I expected.”

“Shit.”

Rich and I were talking about the sharp, sweet, desert drink he was experimenting with, the digestivo, and it wasn’t going well. Rich had created an excellent rich pumpkin creme, but was having trouble creating a drink that wasn’t overpowered by it. Frothy milkshake drinks are great (in fact, we’re making one for November’s instructor’s meeting), but we wanted this drink to hit a little harder. Only it wasn’t working.

Rich thought adding Orange Liqueur might save it, but I wasn’t so sure. The answer to “fix” drinks is almost never adding more ingredients to the stew, but to re-examine the proportions and qualities of the spirits. When I talked to Chauncey at APO a couple weeks back, and gave her some of my recipes, she mentioned that it seemed like some of them, like the French Fire Fllower Tea, while fine drinks, weren’t built with a primary base spirit in mind.

I didn’t want to admit it, but she was absolutely right. If I had to do the French Fire Flower Tea again, I would almost certainly use a vodka infusion of green tea, and then add the St. Germain, Domaine de Canton, Pomegranate juice, and Cassava Pearls.

Rich was making the same mistake I had made, by playing around with too many gorgeous liqueurs (orange, ginger etc.), his drink didn’t have enough of a backbone. I decided to try, based on what Rich had on hand, a variation of the Sazerac, the New Orleans drink historically made with brandy before whiskey was available.

The glass is normally coated with absinthe, but we decided to use the Ginger Brandy Rich had brought instead, and we left it in the glass because it isn’t as overpowering as the absinthe. The pumpkin creme was so glorious, and had a consistency similar to tomato juice, that we made the drink using equal proportions of Cognac and pumpkin. We didn’t want the drink to be too frothy, so we decided to roll the drink like a Bloody Mary, so as not to agitate the Pumpkin:

Take an old fashioned glass (we used rocks for this so we could make more than one) and fill it with ice.
Take your mixing glass, and pour 1 1/2 oz. pumpkin creme, and 1 1/2 oz. of Cognac (Hennessey or anything VS), fill with ice.
Add 5 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters.
Roll the mixture back and forth using a mixing tin 3-5 times.
Dump the ice from the old fashioned glass. Coat with 1/4 oz. Ginger Brandy, and leave the brandy in.
Strain the mixture into the old fashioned glass.
Garnish with pie crust garnish.

Rich was responsible for creating both the pumpkin creme and the crust, so I’ll have him post the recipes for these in a separate post.

The drink was solid, and it was amazing how all of the ingredients came together. The brandy gave it a heat on the back end, the cognac gave it a fall sort of warmth, and the pumpkin was PERFECT, it made the drink.

Until next month…:)