Boozehound (2 page)

The reality, however, is that I am a spirits writer from a country and an age in which many citizens remain extremely skeptical of what they call (clinically)
alcohol
. Or (pejoratively)
hard
liquor. Or worse,
hooch
or
firewater
—even
poison
. We’re a people still living with the failed legacy of Prohibition. Even today, nearly eight decades after its repeal, fifteen states continue to ban liquor sales on Sunday. I, perhaps ironically, live in a town where alcohol sales are still banned every day of the week. I have to actually leave town limits to buy booze. The Prohibition experiment sealed off access to many of the wonderful spirits that people once enjoyed, never to be seen again. To add insult to injury, I am of a generation whose baby boomer parents—who’d rebelled against their own parents’ midcentury cocktail culture—were largely incapable of teaching us how to drink properly.

I got my first inkling of how little I’d known about drinking on a cold autumn afternoon, back when I was a young and clueless college student. A successful, older mentor took me out for a drink. The reason why is lost to me now, but surely it involved some pointed career advice that I never followed. Anyway, this septuagenarian gentleman—who in my hazy memory wore a brimmed hat and a flower tucked into his lapel and carried a pocket watch—took me to a hotel bar. I was dressed, as usual, in a well-worn flannel shirt, wrinkled khakis, running sneakers, and a beat-up baseball cap. As we sat, he announced to the bartender with a wink, “Jimmy, as of today, I’m putting you on official notice. I’ve switched to my winter drink.”

Without a word, the bartender, dressed in white coat and tie, promptly mixed and served him a Stinger. The gentleman laid a crisp hundred-dollar bill on the bar and told me to order, so I asked for a vodka and tonic, hoping it seemed more sophisticated than the cheap beers and shots that I normally drank with my fake ID. The gentleman appraised me, my slovenly attire, and my vodka and tonic, and gruffly declared, “That’s a summer drink.” Then he told the bartender he’d better make another Stinger.

The implication was clear: What sort of adult doesn’t know when to switch from a summer drink to a winter drink? What sort of soft generation was this that needed to be told how to drink at all?

“Vodka has no taste,” he continued. “It’s flavorless.”

“But what’s in a Stinger?” I asked.

He eyed me skeptically. “Crème de menthe. Brandy. Jimmy has made yours with cognac.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I assumed cognac had something to do with rich old guys and pipes and velvet jackets and slippers and maybe sitting in a plush chair and reading a huge book with gilt edges and some title like
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. I knew cognac was expensive, but what could it possibly be made from? Maybe the sweat of French people? Or perhaps cognac was sort of like those fur coats that patchouli-smelling college kids like me were protesting, the ones made from the soft, soft fur of Persian lamb fetuses? In any case, I sure as hell had never witnessed anyone drinking a cognac. And I expressed this to my would-be mentor by scrunching up my nose and saying, “Cognac?” The gentleman gave me a look that suggested he was witnessing the decline and fall of contemporary civilization before his very eyes.

It’s been a very long time since I ordered a vodka and tonic. I’ve made a very long journey from my youth in the South Jersey suburbs to becoming the sort of man who sips a three-hundred-dollar cognac in the morning and calls it work. But it wasn’t as if, one day, I switched from vodka tonics to strange foreign libations. I moved slowly, through the years, from vodka to gin, and then on to whiskey. I learned to love bourbon and rye and Irish whiskey. It hasn’t always been easy. When I started my job, I had to admit a dirty secret, a skeleton in the closet: I’d never really been a huge fan of single-malt Scotch whisky. I realize this does not rise to the level of, say, shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. But since I was a spirits writer, it caused me some discomfort. I worked my way through lighter, so-called chick Scotches, and then slowly into peat monsters that received the macho seal of approval from Scotch snobs. Eventually, single malts took their place of pride in my liquor cabinet.

But beyond whiskey, I still wanted to know more. That quest is where this book takes its shape. When it comes to flavor, I am drawn to the Old World. I like liquor with hard-to-define tastes: the bitter complexity of Italian
amari
, the ancient herbs of Chartreuse, the primal maltiness of Dutch genever. And I’m also drawn to the wilder, untamed parts of the New World: the agave bite of real tequila; the earthy, rustic edge to Brazilian cachaça; the strange, dry conundrum of Peruvian pisco. I don’t know why—I guess it’s the same reason I like stinky cheeses, funky wines, wild game, or yeasty beers. I’m of a similar mind to A. J. Liebling, who wrote in his classic food memoir,
Between Meals
, “I like tastes that know their own minds.” Certainly, whatever it is—this impulse, this search for flavor—is in response to the relatively bland tastes that defined my upbringing.

There is much more going on in the glass when we sit down to drink a particularly profound spirit: a smoky 1928 rum from Fidel Castro’s cellar, a cognac that was bottled before the nineteenth-century phylloxera plague destroyed acres of Europe’s vineyards, one of the only vintage Calvados to have survived the German occupation of Normandy. And it’s about more than just being rare and obscure for the sake of being rare and obscure.

Perhaps what I’m describing is the exact opposite of what’s become the most widely consumed spirit in the United States: vodka. About a year into my job, I looked around and something struck me: people slowly had begun discovering, and getting really interested in, spirits. Readers sent me emails with lots of questions, and it became clear that although many people were game to learn, there were major chunks of cultural knowledge about spirits that had not been passed down. Just like me on that long-ago day with the dapper gentleman and his Stinger, people really didn’t know very much about what they drank. So, despite an increased awareness of spirits, people still mostly drank vodka.

Liebling already saw vodka’s surge coming in the late 1950s, as it began to usurp whiskey and gin. He, predictably, deplored the vodka trend, writing in
Between Meals
, “The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago … and it accounts perfectly for the drink’s rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy—tomato juice, orange juice, and chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.”

That was 1959. The twenty-first-century American consumer is not content to rest with the standard vodka available then. We’ve become an insatiable audience for new ways to buy pretty much the same old thing, and vodka has grown into an industry with more than fifteen billion dollars in annual sales. Not a week passes that I don’t get an email from some public relations professional extolling the virtues of a new superpremium vodka from A Very Special Place (Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Idaho) or infused with some wild new taste (energy drink, açai berries, bacon) or associated with a celebrity (P. Diddy, Dan Aykroyd, Donald Trump) or tied to a political cause (Absolut Global Cooling, anyone?).

“Does the world need another vodka?” is a question that surely has been pondered by those of us who’ve seen liquor store shelves sagging under the sheer volume of premium vodkas on the market. I can only assume that the development of new vodkas—each in a fancy bottle and with a romantic story—will go on until the world ends in fire or ice. In fact, I have a recurring dream in which the true first sign of the Apocalypse is actually a press release for a vodka that has been quintuple-distilled from the tears of flaxen-haired angels and flavored with the ambrosia of Mount Olympus. And it’s promoted by Miley Cyrus.

This is not to say there is anything pernicious or immoral or wrong about liking vodka. Plenty of good, decent people do, and some of these people I count among my friends. Some of them are even dedicated, enlightened foodies—people who pray at the altar of Slow Food and shudder at the thought of inauthentic cuisine. But when you come by their homes, they will still serve you a drink made with an overpriced vodka and perhaps also an artificial fruit mixer. I always accept their hospitality. Likewise, I try not to be like my hectoring mentor at the bar with his Stinger. Most of the time I am successful. But inside, deep down, what I really want to do is grab people by their lapels—or elbows or throats or whatever it is one metaphorically grabs. And what I want to tell them is this: Try something new. Try something strange. Expose yourself to flavors you’ve never considered before. Taste something—anything—that makes you stop for a moment and pay attention and experience. Hopefully, that is what this tale of my own boozy journey inspires.

CHAPTER 1

THE OMBIBULOUS ME

THEY TALK OF MY DRINKING BUT NEVER MY THIRST
.

—
Scottish proverb

T
HE FIRST LIQUOR I EVER EXPERIENCED
, as a teenager, was sambuca—the anise liqueur often served after dinner in Italian restaurants, with three coffee beans for good luck. The only reason for this is because, in our house, a lonely bottle of sambuca sat at the back of our kitchen pantry, hidden behind the hodgepodge bottles of Chivas Regal, Canadian Club, and VO. My parents didn’t drink whiskey—they were the type of baby boomers who as young adults had eschewed spirits and cocktails for the pleasures of wine—and so they likely kept those bottles on hand solely for guests who liked whiskey. As for why sambuca lurked in a dark corner of our shelf, I have never discovered an explanation. We are not Italian-Americans. It’s not as if my parents were jet-setting in Portofino (more like Ocean City, New Jersey). And we’d never hosted a foreign exchange student. Perhaps it was a gift from a guest, someone who believed that my parents might enjoy a bracing, licorice-tasting after-dinner spirit? In that case, it was one of the most misguided gifts of all time.

However, since this bottle of sambuca sat totally untouched and unmonitored, it ended up being the perfect liquor for a sixteen-year-old boy and his friends. My parents were occasionally out to dinner, and so after the police had broken up a keg party in the woods or on the eleventh hole of the local golf course and we were suddenly out of Milwaukee’s Best, my friends and I would find ourselves rummaging deep in my family’s pantry for our now-favorite Italian digestivo.

If we’d had any choice, I doubt sambuca would have been at the top of the list. After all, most American kids grow up calling red Twizzlers “licorice” and picking around the black jelly beans in the jar. My friends thought sambuca was gross, and we mainly drank it in shots. But I kind of liked it. Or at least I pretended to like it. I don’t mean to suggest that I had esoteric tastes as a teenager. In reality, I was a rube who subsisted on Gatorade and Ho Hos, gagged on mustard, and scraped the onions or mushrooms off any dish served with them. But I had seen
La Dolce Vita
on VCR tape, and I took on an air of sambuca connoisseurship as if I’d just returned from café life on the Via Veneto, splashing in the Trevi Fountain with Anita Ekberg, and now had a Vespa parked in the garage next to our riding mower.

The reason was quite simple: L., a certain Valkyrie-like girl who’d recently moved to our neighborhood and started hanging out with us. Her mother had an accent, and everyone said they were “European.” They had a last name that seemed vaguely Scandinavian or, as some in the neighborhood called it, “sort of Aryan.” But who knows where they came from. Regardless, the stunning blond-haired, blue-eyed L. was clearly different from most of the Jersey girls who went to high school with me. I was smitten, and had spent an entire summer trying to convince her to fall in love with me, but had remained squarely in the friend zone.

Still, I was on the lookout for ways to impress her. One autumn night, a group of us fled a busted party on the golf course. “Sambuca, anyone?” I suggested. Among our friends, L. and I walked to my house, cozily arm-in-arm in the crisp fall air. On that night, I decided to make my move.

The sambuca bottle had one of those plastic pourer spouts. After so much usage—since we didn’t really know how to use it properly and never wiped it off—a sugary crust began to form, making it increasingly hard to pour. As luck would have it, on that very night the crust had finally grown impenetrable; I couldn’t even coax a trickle of sambuca from the spout. “What’s the deal?” my friends wanted to know. “We want shots!” L. joined the chorus. Panicked, seeing my moment slipping away from me, I began hacking away at the crust with a butter knife. When that didn’t work, I grabbed a pencil from the kitchen counter and jammed it, forcefully, into the spout. The pencil immediately broke in two, and the top part somehow ended up floating inside the sambuca bottle.