Boozehound - Jason Wilson [23]
About ten years ago, Plymouth dusted off its dormant 1883 recipe for sloe gin and started producing very small batches of it. Sloe berries are in short supply, and it takes more than two pounds of them to make one bottle of the gin. By late 2008, Plymouth, at Ford’s urging, finally managed to produce enough to export a small amount over to us.
It’s fascinating how one liquor can inspire such different nostalgic connections for different people. For me, a sip of a Sloe Gin Fizz does take me all the way back to the Jersey Shore—even though it’s not made with the same sloe gin I’m remembering. I must say, it’s bittersweet and a bit disconcerting to realize that one’s coming-of-age memories are based on a lie. But this Proustian experience flows both ways. “I taste my grandmother’s sloe gin now, and it’s disgusting,” Ford told me. “But I don’t tell her. I always tell her it’s better than the one we do.”
When it comes to Liquor Store Archaeology, the winner by a landslide would have to be a man named Eric Seed. “The Indiana Jones of lost spirits” is how Seed is often described in food-and-drink media. As an importer of the rare and the obscure from around the world, Seed’s fingerprints are all over so many forgotten-but-now-revived spirits that it’s hard to think of anyone who’s been as influential in the renaissance of fine cocktails.
Seed’s company, Haus Alpenz, is the one that imports Hayman’s Old Tom gin, the missing link in recreating the original martini. As people gained new appreciation for vermouth, he began importing the highly regarded Dolin brand from France. He found a source for Batavia arrack, distilled from sugarcane and red rice on the Indonesian island of Java; it had been a staple in the punches of colonial America but had long ago disappeared. In Barbados, Seed located falernum, a spiced rum that had been essential to the mid-twentieth-century tiki drink craze but since vanished. When Seed can’t find what he’s searching for, he’ll commission a distiller to recreate a spirit from old recipes—as he’s done with pimento dram, a traditional Jamaican allspice liqueur. “The customers I sell to,” Seed has told me, “take a very dim view of vodka.”
As globetrotting as he is, Seed’s “Indiana Jones” moniker is pretty funny, kind of like calling a fat guy “Tiny” or a fuzzy kitten “Killer.” That’s because Seed is the complete opposite of Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling, lady-killing rogue archaeologist. Seed is cerebral and mild-mannered, a bespectacled forty-year-old husband and father who lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Unlike Indiana Jones, Seed seems happiest when he’s lecturing like a tenured professor of booze. Wayne Curtis, drinks columnist of the Atlantic, described Seed as “the only person I’ve heard use the term Hanseatic League since I was in high school.”
My friend Emily and I once shared a taxi ride to the airport with Seed, and he held forth for the entire thirty minutes on the history of vermouth; the species of alpine botanicals that grow near Chambéry, France; the genealogy of the Dolin family; and a comparison of French amers versus Italian amari. (Emily, who was very hungover, later joked that she nearly jumped out of the speeding taxi.)
The first time I met Eric Seed was in 2007 at Tales of the Cocktail, the famed spirits industry event that happens every year in New Orleans. Tales of the Cocktail is a blend of academic conference,