Pisco Primer — Don’t Be Caught With Your Pants Down!
You know how there’s a new chic liquor every year? Ever wonder why? I think the train leaves the station more or less like this:
- Somebody decides to import/export/increase selling of some obscure hooch, let’s call it cachaca. I mean absinthe. I mean rye! No, let’s just call it hooch.
- Anyway, said hooch vendors or marketers shoehorn every editor and journalist they find and ply them with the stuff.
- Finally, they find a journalist who just had a waterpump blow up on their old Volvo. (Only 6 journalists in America are currently wealthy enough to drive anything but elderly jalopies. See previous blog post: Journalism, the New Poetry.)
- This waterpump-desperate journalist pitches a story about the new hooch to every editor in the world.
- An editor, facing a holiday news-hole, or possibly mistaking this writer for the kid of someone she knew in college, assigns the story.
- In an effort to not get this flimsy story killed, this waterpump-jonesing journalist wildly overstates his case for the new hooch.
- The wildly overstated story runs!
- All the rivals of the editor take note, and assign stories of their own, not wanting to be caught off-trend.
- The waterpump is paid for! Oh glory day. The car lives on.
- The rest of us suddenly have to drink rye!
I bring this up because I have spied the next one coming: Pisco! A Chilean brandy. If you’re thinking Pisco… Sour. Yes! That’s the one. As my copy of the lovely book “Vintage Cocktails” (1999, Waggoner and Markel) tells it:
“Essentially a Collins without the fizz, a Sour is one of America’s oldest cocktails. The original, drunk when Scarlett O’Hara was still a toddler, was made with brandy and egg white. [What was so sour about that? -ed] That version was abandoned as French imports became less common and Southerners learned to distill their own spirits. By the early 1900’s, whiskey had replaced brandy as the spirit of choice for most Sour enthusiasts. During the 1920’s and 30’s, brandy reasserted itself in the form of the Pisco Sour, a cocktail made from Chilean pisco brandy, which was, at the time, readily available in the United States. [Because of guys with Tommy Guns running it over from our border with Santiago? -ed] Pisco is no longer a common bar finding, but if you sight a bottle, we heartily recommend it for consideration.
I have sighted a bottle! In the L.A. Times food section. Let’s ignore the flimsy sourcing from:
- A Harvard-educated (ooh!) sister who “oversees” a Pisco company. (Not owns, not manages, oversees. Hmm. Is heir to?)
- An Ica based enologist — who we can assume works for the Harvard sister.
- The Comisión Nacional del Pisco (ConaPisco) — which we can assume is the pork board of Pisco, essentially the marketing partner of the Harvard sister.
- Two bartenders, whom we can assume were supplied by the Harvard-sister’s US distributor.
Anyway, I digress. What’s important here is: Pisco! It’s coming. It’s got “fire, with lots of body” but also expresses “terroir” and chic American bartenders are in a frenzy to put it in cocktails.
Of course, expressing terroir is a wine term, it refers to the way a particular parcel of grapes express various qualities of their particular parcel of land, the gunflint of the ground where Pouilly-Fumé grows and the way that comes across in the scent of the wine, for instance. And of course, most winemakers who care about terroir would rather stab you in the eye than let you take their fancy wine and ‘steep it with yerba maté, combine it with lime and grapefruit syrup in a traditional maté gourd, and serve it with a silver straw, or bombilla.’ As one does with pisco. Also, straws are not generally used with things you want to savor the scent of, they’re more a git r’ done device. But whatever. Nothing in your rational mind is important here. What’s important is: Pisco is coming your way! Pay attention! Read this article now or you are going to spend the next 6 months with more and more media stories about pisco popping up around you until you are forced to finally give in and think it’s really cool and order some. Save yourself the worry! And if you find this in a google search in 10 months, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I remember hearing a whole thing on MPR about pisco becoming the next ‘it’ hooch 3-4 years ago. Guess it didn’t take.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never heard of pisco being described as brandy, but then again I’m not too knowledgeable about such things. When I was in Chile a number of years ago everyone told us it’s made from cactus and is similar to tequila. The pisco we had down there was quite tasty. The stuff I’ve been able to find up here seems to have an incredible ability to choke my throat closed before it even hits my tongue. I guess my advice then, if you have to/want to try some, is it’s like tequila – generally speaking, the more expensive it is the better your experience will be.
Spending a buck = vomit.
Spending two bucks = stomach ache. Spending three bucks = no harm, no foul.
And so and so on.