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Report: Third Annual Wine Country Cocktail Competition

California's Wine Country is a big place: some contestants in this year's Wine Country Cocktail Competition drove an hour and a half to get there. I helped judge the competition along with a panel that included Brian Kropf of Mutineer Magazine and radio host and party person Ziggy the Wine Gal. 

The competition was sponsored by the Perfect Puree of Napa Valley, Charbay Distillery & Winery, and Glace Luxury Ice. It was run Iron Chef style, with a secret ingredient announced at the competition. That ingredient was a selection of summer berries. Each contestant also had to include a Charbay vodka, a Perfect Puree flavor, and a Glace ice sphere or big cube in the drink. 

The combination of big ice and puree presented quite the challenge- because of the fruit in the drinks, they'd need to be shaken, but then adding a big ice ball to the drink would continue to dilute the drinks after they were served (on a hot day). Many bartenders ended up with drinks that may have been right at serving time, but that quickly became watery and flabby. Others compensated for the big ice by shaking less or even just stirring the drink, but some of those ended up being too warm.

Overall, the flavors of the drinks were lovely but sometimes the format (up versus on the rocks, etc.) wasn't ideal- another aspect of cocktails that can be hard to determine on the fly. 

The winner of the third annual Wine Country Cocktail Competition was Michael Pazdon of Goose & Gander. Kelly Dallas of SolBar second place and Cappy Sorentino of SpoonBar in third. Congratulations to the winners and to all the entrants. 

 

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 More photos by Ashley Teplin are here. 

New Liquor Releases for July 2012

Over at ShakeStir.com I write the New Booze blog, keeping track of new spirits products hitting the market and spirits reaching distribution into new states. 

In July 2012, the new products I wrote about were:

• Ardbeg Day scotch
• Dad's Hat Aged Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey
• D'USSE' Cognac
• Greenhook Ginsmiths Beach Plum Gin Liqueur
• Agua Libre relaunch
• WhistlePig TripleOne Rye
• Early Times Fire Eater
• Jefferson's Ocean Aged Bourbon
• Punzone' Vodka
• Dale DeGroff's Pimento Aromatic Bitters
• Spodee

Check them all out at ShakeStir.com. 

A Rosemary Lemon Vodka Sour from Seattle

In last week's post for FineCooking.com, I used Antoine's Cocktail, a drink from Liberty in Seattle, as an example of how to create a sour. 

Antoine's Cocktail includes vodka, lemon, lemon peel, rosemary, and simple syrup, but it's served on a big cube like an Old Fashioned rather than up like a Margarita. 

The recipe is here.

Antoine's Cocktail. Photo by Andrew Friedman

Grapefruit-Sake Spritzer

Sometimes sake is just too savory for me to enjoy much of on its own, yet most sake cocktails are usually so.. meh. 

So I made a spritzer by adding some grapefruit juice and soda water. It was really, really good. Go make one.- here's the recipe You can drink 'em by the gallon. 

Buffalo Trace Distillery Visit

This spring I visited 8 American whiskey distilleries, including Buffalo Trace. Buffalo Trace is owned by the Sazerac company. They make Buffalo Trace, Blanton's, Elmer T. Lee, Eagle Rare, Van Winkle, and other whiskey brands, plus the make/own/import other spirits including Rain vodka, Puebla Viejo tequila, and Glenfarclass scotch. 

Unlike most of the other American whiskey distilleries I visited, Buffalo Trace feels like a campus or a mini factory town. Other distilleries have just the central distillery and bottling line, but the aging warehouses are spread further afield. They're closer by at Buffalo Trace.

The name Buffalo Trace comes from the paths that the buffalo took to this area, where they would cross the river. The distillery is located where several paths intersected. Our guide Freddie said that this site is also probably where the first bourbons were ever shipped down the river to New Orleans in the early days of bourbon. 

Here at Buffalo Trace, several rickhouses are built of brick on the outside and have many windows, unlike the typical metal-clad warehouses. However, the inside of the brick warehouses are wooden structures that hold the barrels, not connected to the outside framework. 

Having all of this close together makes for a good tour- you can walk from building to building  (as I did) and see every part of the distilling, aging, and bottling operation. 

Buffalo Trace launched the first single-barrel bourbon, Blanton's, in 1984. We saw it being bottled. We also saw the vats for chill filtration, which was helpful as I was about to give a talk about filtration in spirits right after my visit. 

We were also treated to seeing the bitters room, where they make Peychaud's and Regan's Orange bitters. I got to try those suckers out of the tap! To make them, they add the ingredients to one of 7 little tanks, age them 2 weeks, filter the solids, let them rest a week, and then bottle them. 

 

Visiting Buffalo Trace

Information about visiting the distillery is found at BuffaloTraceDistillery.com. There are regular tours, hard hat tours, tours specializing in the time right after Prohibition, and even a nighttime ghost tour. 

Vodka, Aperol, Grapefruit, Honey

In a post on FineCooking.com, I put up a recipe for the House of Balloons, an excellently-named cocktail created by Sean Hoard of Portland's Teardrop Lounge. It contains vodka, Aperol, grapefruit juice, honey syrup, and soda water. 

I tried the drink and it's delicious- and probably a good way to get your unadventurous friends into better cocktails. 

Get the recipe here.

Come Join the Wine Country Cocktail Competition on Monday August 6th

I'm helping judge the Wine Country Cocktail Competition in Napa Valley on Monday, August 6th. Tickets are still available to the event, which is sponsored by Charbay Distillery & Winery and Perfect Puree of Napa Valley.

Tickets are available here. Come say hello!