Boozehound - Jason Wilson [40]
On the distillery tour, I was struck by how automated the place was. Amico, who’d previously been an economics professor at the University of Pisa, was clearly pleased with efficiency. “We have a robot,” Amico said. “As you can see, there’s practically no manual intervention at all. It only takes twelve people to run this plant. We are one of the most profitable brands at Brown-Forman.”
“But the blending is done manually, right?” I asked.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “The only thing they do manually is to cut the bags of sugar open and pour it.”
He showed me where the brandy is blended with neutral spirits and sugar “and our natural flavors, which of course I cannot disclose.”
In its marketing, Tuaca makes a big deal out of tracing the recipe’s ancestry back to the Renaissance and the Medicis. In fact, the Medici crest is on the bottle. I asked Amico if that’s the same formula the Tuoni and Canepa families used. Is it true that the recipe really dates back to the Medicis? “I cannot tell you because I have lost the tracks of history,” Amico said.
What we do know is that when Tuaca was launched in 1938, it was originally called Cognac al Latte, or “Milk Cognac”; this was, of course, in the days before Cognac was an AOC-protected name. In the beginning, Tuaca clocked in at 42 percent alcohol by volume, or 84 proof. Now, it’s sold in the United States at a much more accessible 70 proof. “Tuaca has an easy taste. It’s not difficult to drink. I’ve never found someone who doesn’t like it,” Amico said. “I tasted the old Tuaca, at 84 proof. It could be that it was even a little more tasty, but the current recipe is easier to drink. So probably you can drink more of the current one.”
I noted that Jägermeister is also sold at 70 proof, and I wondered if that was coincidence or whether Brown-Forman saw Tuaca as a competitor to Jägermeister. “Yes,” Amico said. “For some reason, the benchmark in this category is Jägermeister. But I really don’t understand why Jägermeister is the benchmark.”
After our tour, we went to lunch at a restaurant overlooking the port. We were joined by a dozen Brown-Forman distributors who were visiting from the United States, mostly New York. During a wine-soaked lunch, I sat next to a guy named George Sideris, who’d been in the spirits business for more than thirty years, and who’d handled Tuaca when it was originally distributed by Seagram’s. “I remember it before they dropped the proof,” he said. “Man, when it was 84 proof, it was like turpentine.” Back in the 1970s, the main Tuaca cocktail being promoted was a winter warmer called Hot Apple Pie. “It was supposed to be an after-skiing drink,” Sideris said. “Tuaca was also popular in the gay community in San Francisco. There was a drink called a Bear Hug, and they served it in a glass with a little bear on the stem. If one guy was interested in someone, he would send over a Bear Hug. And if the other guy accepted the drink, that meant he was interested.”
At the other end of the table, one of the younger distributors was saying loudly, “Tuaca, man. I probably drank a case of Tuaca my freshman year at college!”
A Round of Drinks:
Secret Old Recipes
How do you know that you’re in a real cocktail bar? I’ve found that there are always a couple of bottles sitting on the back bar that will serve as a sort of secret handshake or knowing wink. One is maraschino liqueur, which I described in chapter 2. The other is Chartreuse, usually the 110-proof green version. If you spy those two, you can be pretty certain you’re in a bar that takes its cocktails seriously. In fact, when I see a speakeasy menu these days, I am shocked if I don’t see any drinks using either of those two spirits.
Perhaps the finest use of both liqueurs is in the Last Word. This is a Prohibition-era cocktail invented at the Detroit