Boozehound - Jason Wilson [0]
Copyright © 2010 by Jason Wilson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book have been adapted from previously published material in the Washington Post, The Smart Set from Drexel University, Imbibe Magazine, and Condé Nast Traveler.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Jason, 1970–
Boozehound : on the trail of the rare, the obscure, and the overrated in spirits / Jason Wilson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “A journalistic excursion into lesser-known, forgotten, and misunderstood spirits from around the world, with recipes”—Provided by publisher.
1. Liquors. 2. Cookery (Liquors) I. Title.
TP590.W55 2010
641.2′5—dc22
2010013363
eISBN: 978-1-58008-611-0
v3.1
FOR JEN
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction The Booze Beat
CHAPTER 1 • THE OMBIBULOUS ME
CHAPTER 2 • FLAVOR AND ITS DISCONTENTS
CHAPTER 3 • LIQUOR STORE ARCHAEOLOGY
CHAPTER 4 • ROMANCE: THEY POUR IT ON
CHAPTER 5 • BITTER IS BELLA
CHAPTER 6 • WATER OF LIFE
CHAPTER 7 • TERROIR-ISTS
CHAPTER 8 • OF POLITICS AND RUM
CHAPTER 9 • THE ANGELS’ SHARE
Acknowledgments
Appendix
INTRODUCTION
The Booze Beat
AS LONG AS YOU REPRESENT ME AS PRAISING ALCOHOL I SHALL NOT COMPLAIN.
—H. L. Mencken
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was at a fancy party with several people who have successful careers in what’s commonly called lifestyle journalism. We were drinking special cocktails made with a very special gin that had been infused with cucumbers and rose petals, and mixed with rose water that had been specially imported from Lebanon.
I was chatting with a beautiful, sexy friend who wrote for a magazine that covers luxury spa vacations. She got that job, in part, because she wrote a travel book about bathing culture that one critic claimed “bred a new publishing hybrid, the beauty-travel memoir, Bruce Chatwin by way of Allure magazine.”
As we chatted, I shared some good news with her: I had just been hired to write a column for a major newspaper about spirits and cocktails.
“You should really meet my friend,” she told me. “He’s the perfume critic at the Times.”
“Really?” I said. “Let me just see if I’m hearing this correctly. The luxury spa columnist would like the spirits columnist to meet the perfume columnist.”
“Yes,” she said, with a beautiful, sexy smile.
“Wait,” I said. “Did you just hear that?”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I just thought for a second that I heard the sound of the Apocalypse happening.”
I often said things like this in the beginning of my new job. I’d grown up, after all, in a family of men who made their money packing fruit and vegetables—real work. I knew what it was like to wake up for work at 4 a.m., to haggle over crates of cantaloupe at the produce terminal before sunrise. By thirteen, I knew what it felt like to unload a truckload of onions in the July sun; how your arms were ripped up by the fifty-pound red mesh bags. My father mangled his thumb in a machine that stitches together bags of potatoes. I could imagine my grandfather saying, “Spirits and cocktail columnist? Really? I’m spinning in my goddamn grave.” At least that’s how my misguided thinking went in those early days.
When I was in school, I’d dreamed of becoming Ernest Hemingway. Now, I travel and drink and write about my traveling and drinking. Close enough, I guess—though likely closer to the paunchy, boozy, crazy late Hemingway than the younger, dashing one who ran with bulls, drove ambulances in the Great War, and wrote classic novels. It’s sort of like dreaming of becoming Elvis when you’re young, and then actually becoming Elvis years later—but maybe you’ve become the wrong