Boozehound (30 page)

Adapted from Trader Vic’s original recipe by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry

Piña colada
simply means “strained pineapple” in Spanish. That being the case, it’s always seemed odd to me that coconut elbowed its way in to become the dominant flavor of this poolside favorite. It’s an astonishing act of hubris, really, for Señor Coco López and his canned Cream of Coconut to have hijacked the blender away from pineapple. Now, I bear no ill will toward Señor López. If you happen to enjoy Coco López, by all means, have at it. Certainly, the version that Isaac was blending up for Charo on the lido deck of the Love Boat was loaded with coconut cream, and we all still love Isaac. But perhaps I can persuade you to try a lighter, fresher, and more pineapple-y version of the drink.

But first, I think we should delve into the somewhat murky history of the piña colada. It has been deemed the official drink of Puerto Rico, and during the 1950s a number of the island’s hotel bartenders claimed they created it. The most oft-repeated story is that the drink was invented at the Caribe Hilton Hotel. As legend has it, one night in 1954—during a strike of coconut cutters, no less—a bartender cut the top off a pineapple, hollowed out the fruit, dumped in Coco López mix and rum, and served it with a straw. It may or may not be a coincidence that Coco López came on the market around 1954.

Truth be told, all of those Puerto Rican claims are dubious. There are references to the piña colada in periodicals and books in the 1920s and 1930s, and most point to Cuba as its origin and pineapple as the primary ingredient. Even Trader Vic’s classic bartending guide included a piña colada recipe containing only rum and pineapple juice. Meanwhile, a Trader Vic drink called a Bahia, with coconut cream, more closely mirrors the modern-day piña colada. Regardless, the cream-of-coconut version became the one that captured the fancy of Americans. In the 1970s and 1980s, heavy cream and dark rum were added to the mix, and we had the supersweet, milkshakelike libation that became the clichéd standard. This, of course, was the Tom Cruise in
Cocktail
era, when cocktails in general became so cloyingly sweet.

When it comes to making a piña colada, I want to preach two things: fresh pineapple juice, and coconut water instead of coconut cream. No Coco López. For the purest piña colada, I favor a recipe of three parts pineapple juice, one part coconut water, and one part rum. With that basic 3:1:1 ratio, you’ll discover a drink that’s a world away from what typically comes out of the blender. I usually don’t strain my pineapple juice after pureeing it (making mine a
piña sin colar
, I guess) since I think this helps the drink holds together a little better. For the coconut element, coconut water gives the drink a lighter, more complex, nuttier flavor. You can make piña coladas with all types of rums, but my favorite version uses rhum agricole, the Martinique rum made from pure sugarcane juice, from brands such as Rhum Clément and Neisson. The fresh cane notes mingle well with the pineapple and coconut and add a level of—dare I say it—sophistication.

PIÑA COLADA

Serves 4

½ pineapple, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks, plus 4 small slices for garnish

4 ounces white rhum agricole

4 ounces coconut water, such as Zico or Vita Coco

3 cups ice cubes

Place the pineapple chunks in a blender and puree. Measure out 1½ cups (12 ounces), then freeze any leftover puree for another use. Combine the pineapple puree, rum, and coconut water in a blender, then add the ice. Blend on high speed for about 1 minute. Pour into 4 Collins glasses. Garnish each with a pineapple slice, and serve with straws.

CHAPTER 9

THE ANGELS’ SHARE

EXUBERANCE IS BETTER THAN TASTE
.

—
Gustave Flaubert

I
DON’T KNOW WHY
I
WENT TO
the Hemingway Bar during my last trip to Paris, but I did. Maybe I wanted to see if there were still Americans who bought into that old 1920s fantasy vision of Paris. Or maybe I was just looking for trouble. Anyway, let me be clear, the only reason to go to the Hemingway Bar, which is in the Ritz Hotel, is to watch utter ridiculousness in action. Cocktails at the Hemingway Bar start at €30. Glasses of 1834 cognac sell for €1,250. The Guinness-certified “world’s most expensive cocktail,” the Ritz Sidecar (with caviar), sells for €1,250. On the walls hang tons of Hemingway memorabilia, including a creepy photo of Papa, ailing, without a beard, from the late 1950s, and, disturbingly, his twelve-gauge Browning rifle mounted above the bar—which may or may not be in poor taste seeing as a gun like this is how the man killed himself. I ordered a Leperliac, purportedly “a hunting cocktail created in the Armagnac country,” which called for Armagnac, mint, “white French clarified grape juice,” and champagne. Okay, I thought, for €30 they must have at least pressed the grape juice themselves, right? No. Pierre, the bartender, grabbed a plastic bottle of store-bought grape juice, the French version of Welch’s, and poured it into the shaker, along with a weak, free pour of the brandy and the sparkling wine. He offered me a newspaper and chips, as if that would make up for things.

As I was drinking my banal Leperliac, I felt someone rub my back and ask me to scoot over one bar stool. It was an American woman from Manhattan named Joy, seventyish but you could tell she’d been a beauty in her day. Joy was accompanied by a slightly younger couple from South Carolina. The husband told me he was “in the timber and real estate business.” Joy took my hand as if I were her oldest confidant and whispered in my ear, “I’ve known these people for years and I can never understand a word they say.” My newspaper was open on the bar, to an article about the president, and Joy whispered, “We don’t really like Obama. But my father always said, ‘Don’t talk politics or religion.’ ” They’d all flown in to Paris for the weekend, for a friend’s birthday, and had been staying at the Ritz.

These people could have been minor characters out of
The Sun Also Rises
, or one of Fitzgerald’s novels, except for one major omission: they knew very little about their liquor. They’d been served by the white-jacketed charlatan Pierre the night before, and Joy clearly was charmed. “How does he just know all the measurements?” she squealed. “Isn’t he just the best bartender?”

The guy from South Carolina didn’t know what he wanted. “Grey Goose and a squeeze of lemon is usually my fly-fishing drink,” he said. Then he halfheartedly told me he liked whiskey. Since I was about to visit Normandy the next day, I suggested maybe he should try a Calvados. “What is that?” he said. Pierre served him a small glass, and the guy winced: “Wow, that’s got some real vapors.”

“Don’t get those French 75s like Pierre made us last night,” said Joy “Those will put you under the bar.”

At which point, I knocked over the remainder of my €30 drink onto the bar. “Look,” Joy said, “I’ve made him nervous.” She whispered, “Are you staying at the hotel?”

“No,” I said. “Seven hundred euros a night is a little rich for me.”

“Seven hundred! You couldn’t get a very good room for that!”

Did people like this still exist in 2009? They clearly did. And some of them still tossed good money at spirits. In December of 2009, the landmark 427-year-old Parisian restaurant La Tour d’Argent cleaned out its cellar and auctioned off eighteen thousand bottles, including some extremely rare bottles of cognac. Three bottles, dating to 1788, sold respectively for $37,000, $31,000, and $27,300. The same week, at Christie’s in New York, a bottle of fifty-year-old Glennfiddich Scotch sold at auction for $38,000. Just over a week later, Bonhams in New York auctioned off the coveted Willard S. Folsom Collection of Old and Rare Whiskies. Among the 895 bottles on sale, more than fifty Scotches sold for at least $1,000 apiece—including a fifty-year-old Dalmore and a fifty-year-old Balvenie, each of which sold for over $7,000. This flurry of high bidding had raised a few questions for me. Such as: Isn’t there a financial crisis going on? Or: Why does the value of booze go up while the value of my portfolio remains in the toilet? Or: Have spirits become better investments than real estate, classic automobiles, and fine art?

I’d visited France a few months prior to those big sales, in September, and I was there to witness a different auction, the annual La Part des Anges auction in Cognac. At La Part des Anges, the bigwigs of the local spirits industry bid on very rare cognacs—the name means “The Angels’ Share,” the nickname for the amount of the cognac that evaporates in a barrel as it ages over decades. But before I headed to Cognac, I had a stopover in Paris and then planned to visit Guillaume Drouin’s Calvados distillery just before the September apple harvest was about to begin.

While in Paris, I stopped in at Au Verger de la Madeleine, a well-respected dealer in rare wines and spirits. I wanted to play some real Liquor Store Archaeology: I’d come looking for the coveted Chartreuse Tarragona, the version that had been made in Spain from 1903, when the Chartreuse monks were expelled from France, until 1989, when the monks closed the distillery. Olivier Madinier, one of Au Verger de la Madeleine’s managing partners, told me he had three bottles in his cellar. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but he rolled down the gate and locked up the shop, then he and I descended into the dank, dusty cellar in a tiny elevator. We strolled past rows of thousand-euro bottles of Bordeaux, and then there were the bottles of Tarragona I’d heard so much about. Three of them. Each selling for eight hundred euros. Calling them “mythic,” Madinier said, “For connoisseurs, it’s more complex. It’s rare, but it’s good to drink. This is very important for us. Our clients are not only collectors. They like to drink the spirits.” I told him I wholeheartedly endorsed this philosophy. Madinier held one of the Tarragonas in his hands, and I prayed silently that maybe he might pop it open and give me a taste. I’m not sure whether or not he thought I might buy a bottle—I wish I could have, but eight hundred euros is too rich for my blood. So Madinier and I stood silently for an awkward moment. Then he put the bottle back, we crowded into the little elevator and went back upstairs, and he reopened the shop.

I showed Madinier my auction catalog for La Part des Anges. Some of the estimated cognac prices seemed outrageous: a Frapin for €2,800, a Pierre Ferrand for €3,000, a Martell for €3,500. He paged through the catalog quickly and shrugged, seeming to say, “nothing special here.” A dozen or cognacs with several-thousand-dollar price tags sat on his shelves, including a Delamain (Le Voyage) in a Baccarat crystal decanter for €6,500. Madinier told me that collectors certainly like to buy these pricey bottles. But if someone comes in and just wants a cognac to enjoy, he often steers them toward something like Jean Fillioux Rèserve Familiale. At around $200, it’s definitely pricey as hell, but it feels like a downright bargain compared to those at auction. “If you like to drink cognac, this is what we recommend,” he said of Fillioux’s family reserve.

Madinier pointed to a bottle of Delamain from 1840 on his shelves. “We once opened a bottle of this.” He sighed. “Only a few hours later, it was bad.” He let that fact silently sink in for a moment.

“Why?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said, with a shrug. “Maybe it was the keeping. But at the end of the day, it was bad.” With a chuckle he said, “I guess you have to drink it rapidly. I got to taste some before it went bad.”

“How was it different?” I asked.

“There are so many different flavors. Leather …” Then he just clammed up, as if even trying to put words to the taste would be a kind of heresy. “There are flavors you just can’t find in a younger cognac,” he said.

I stared dumbly at him. I hoped he’d go on. “Really?” I said, not knowing what to say,

“Yes,” he said. “It was … amazing.”

“Well,” I said, “it sounds like maybe it’s impossible to describe?” No response.

“So … would you say that it’s impossible to describe?”

He now looked at me as if I were profoundly stupid. “Yes.” And that was all he said.