Boozehound - Jason Wilson [21]
MARTINEZ
Serves 1
1½ ounces Old Tom gin
1½ ounces sweet vermouth
1 teaspoon maraschino liqueur
2 dashes orange bitters
Orange peel twist, for garnish
Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the gin, vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and bitters. Stir vigorously for at least 30 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the orange peel twist.
Recipe by Derek Brown of the Passenger and the Columbia Room, Washington, D.C.
One final note: You’ll notice that both the Martinez and the Red Hook call for maraschino liqueur, and some of you may be wondering what that is. Never confuse, and never replace, maraschino liqueur with the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries or with other cherry spirits. The sharply sweet and fragrant Luxardo maraschino liqueur—in its telltale straw-covered bottle—is widely available, and it’s what you want to seek out. The original Luxardo distillery, with its recipe dating to 1821, operated in Zara, on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia, until it was destroyed during World War II. Giorgio Luxardo emigrated to Italy and rebuilt the company in 1946 at its current site, near Padua. Giorgio’s descendants still make the same product. Their maraschino liqueur is distilled from a special variety of sour cherries called Marasca Luxardo, which are grown near the Luxardo family’s distillery. The cherries are infused with distillate and aged for three years in Finnish ash casks, which adds no color to the clear liqueur.
As recently as a century ago, maraschino liqueur was used to preserve marasca cherries. But today, maraschino liqueur has nothing to do with the generic, glowing spheres you find in jars in American supermarkets. When I met Franco Luxardo in Italy, he had a laugh as he recalled first encountering the ersatz “maraschino” cherries while in the United States as an exchange student in the 1950s. “I remember being surprised by this strange, bright red cherry they served me,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
LIQUOR STORE ARCHAEOLOGY
THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORLD IS THAT EVERYONE IS A FEW DRINKS BEHIND.
—Humphrey Bogart
MY BROTHER TYLER AND I—long past our forays at the Jelly Belly store—used to play a game we called Liquor Store Archaeology. The aim was to make a pith-helmeted-like visit to older, neglected liquor stores—the sort of family-owned shops that perhaps were once prosperous and now do business mainly in pint-size flasks or liters of cheap wine or beer by the can. Inside, we’d scour the dark bottom shelves and dank back corners of the place, looking for forgotten bottles that had been languishing, perhaps for decades. That’s one of the special things about booze. Unlike just about every product in the world, distilled spirits almost never have to be rotated. More often than not, we turned up something rare or just plain strange. Our finds spanned the world: caraway-flavored kümmel from Germany, a wasabi-flavored schnapps, a brandy from Armenia called Ararat, a honey liqueur bottled with a real honeycomb.
It became rather competitive for a while, and it was funny to find the sorts of strange spirits that had been earlier generations’ versions of flavored vodka. I thought I had taken a slight lead in the game when I discovered a sweet, peachy aperitif called Panache—with a hippie-ish, 1970s faux–Art Nouveau label—that was made by Domaine Chandon but now is impossible to find. Then Tyler countered with a liqueur from Sicily called Mandarino del Castello. The label says it’s made from mandarin peels, and the oversaturated photo of the hilltop castle and too-blue Mediterranean sky suggests the mid-1960s, but about Mandarino del Castello we can find no information.
I figured I’d won when I unearthed a bottle of Cordial Campari. Though made by the same company, Cordial Campari is not to be confused with the more famous red Italian aperitivo.