Boozehound - Jason Wilson [70]
Then I went to Peru, and realized that I hadn’t really known very much at all about my friend pisco. I was traveling with a few bartenders from San Francisco: drinks writer Jordan Mackay, and three fellows—Walter Moore, Carlos Romero, and Duggan McDonnell—who planned to launch a premium pisco called Campo de Encanto in 2010. On this trip, Romero, the master distiller, and Moore and McDonnell, his American partners, were developing their acholado, or blended pisco.
Lima is a great culinary hot spot, with a cool, overcast Mendocino-like climate. But we rolled out of Lima on a bus ride south. No bathrooms on this five-hour ride, but all the B and C American action movies you could hope for. After Vin Diesel in xXx, we took bets on what movie would come next. My money was on Iron Eagle, with Lou Gossett, Jr. I lost when a dubbed Superman III began. The landscape soon turned to desert. We passed the historic port of Pisco and arrived in the viticultural center of Ica, which is surrounded by giant mountains of sand. There is almost no rainfall there. Who knew you could grow grapes in such a place?
We stayed at the oasis of Huacachina, an old resort filled with dune buggies and backpackers. It was weird, sort of like a cross between a hippie ski town and Mos Eisley, with sandboarders instead of skiers and dune buggy drivers who drove like Han Solo. As we sat in a café, we watched one dune buggy driver skid down the dirt street. “You don’t want that guy to take you up into the mountains,” said the guy at the café. “He’s a drunk.”
Huacachina is said to be haunted by a witch in the middle of the lagoon who eats men at night. At least one man goes missing every year, according to legend. At night, one of my traveling companions wandered alone down to the water and claimed—totally freaking out—to have seen the witch. The jury is out on whether that sighting was pisco related. Perhaps it stemmed from excessive consumption of a coca leaf–infused pisco? Anyway, the freak-out was ill-timed, since we were expected at a house party in Ica. So I asked the Peruvian distiller, Romero, to reassure our friend that the witch was simply a myth. “But it’s true,” Romero insisted.
“Are you serious?” I said.
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Okaaay,” I said. I tried a different approach. “Well, one man goes missing every year, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, has anyone gone missing yet this year?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I reasoned, “if one man has already gone missing, if the witch already has her quota, then you can reassure our friend that he won’t go missing.”
We finally did get to the house party in Ica, actually a birthday party for the seventy-year-old mother of the team’s Peruvian business partner. A band played and several bottles of pisco were passed around. However, only one glass was passed around for thirty people. No matter where we went—house parties, bars, distilleries—and no matter how many people we were with—four, twelve, thirty, fifty—we were only ever provided one shot glass. The tradition, in Peru, is that you pour yourself a little pisco from the bottle, pass it to the next person, take your shot, then pass the glass. I don’t care how popular pisco becomes in the States, that is one Peruvian custom that will definitely not make the leap north. Regardless, on that night, I filled up my shot glass, and then passed it to my right or to my left, either to a septuagenarian gentleman or his teenage granddaughter. The night ended at a karaoke bar in downtown Ica, where I sang an amazing rendition of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” A video of this actually existed, but, fortunately or unfortunately, the guy who shot the video had his laptop stolen on the bus ride back to Lima. So the world will never know whether or not I have a future as a Lady Gaga impersonator.
Peruvian pisco, it turns out, is just as strange and surprising as ski towns in deserts, drunk dune buggy drivers, thirty people drinking from the same glass, and the calculus of witch sightings. Which means, I guess, that pisco gives