Alcademics.com

Glasgow Bars: The Blue Dog

The Blue Dog, as three different people told me, is "the place where everyone ends up," as it's open until three in the morning. I got there a little before 1AM on Saturday night and it was jammed. 

 

The long bar had five or six bartenders working at the same time. The cocktail menu didn't look terribly appealing to me with the exception of a couple drinks.

After a short and understandable wait, I ordered a Spruce Moose, which calls for Rittenhouse rye, calvados, maple syrup, and orange bitters. Despite the crowd, the bartender took his time and made it with care, which I greatly appreciated. The drink came out well-balanced and pretty darn tasty. Huge points for that. 

The crowd was a complete mix of everyone from 20 to 50-plus year olds. It had the look of a place that really gets crazy the later it gets. It's just up from my hotel, so I might give it another visit in a fews days.

 

New Booze: Paul-Marie & Fils Devant La Porte Cognac

I received a sample of Paul-Marie & Fils Cognac, a brand independently bottled by Nicolas Palazzi. Palazzi is buying single casks of cognac  and hand bottling them unfiltered and at full cask strength. He apparently has a few bottlings under different names and this is the first under the Paul-Marie & Fils label.

The one he sent me to try is the Devant La Porte barrel, meaning "the barrel in front of the door". Devant La Porte was distilled in 1951 and bottled in August of 2009. The cask produced 257 bottles at the full 51% alcohol and they retail for a suggested $600 each.

This cognac is a dark copper in color, with an aroma typical of well-aged grapes- a slightly gamey (rancio?) wet redwood with a fresh grape and raisin and slight chocolate backing. On the palate it bursts with dusty fruitcake flavors- dried apricots, pears in syrup, fruit leather, regular leather, bitter tobacco, hot car vinyl, dried oranges. It must be pretty acidic, because my mouth began salivating like crazy- I'm practically drooling. With each successive sip I'm getting more and more flavors and the aftertaste just lingers forever.

In short, this is really freaking delicious cognac.

I was a bit worried when Palazzi said this was bottled at cask strength- thinking that would be good for mixing but not sipping at that high proof- but I was way wrong. This cognac is too good for mixing (at its price point it sure ought to be) and there is nothing too hot about it even at 51% alcohol. I say drink it at full proof and just have fewer sips- it will last longer than way too.

An Online Course in Cognac

I'm increasingly interested in how different alcohol production/control and marketing bureaus differ from each other in their approach to promoting their common interests. The Scotch Whisky Association leads by litigation and has good information on its website, but doesn't seem to do all that much outreach to press. Neither tequila's CRT (regulatory agency) or the CNIT (industry bureau) is doing a good job of any sort with regard to PR, seemingly leaving brands to do the work. Lately I've noticed the Cognac Bureau, the BNIC, adding new programs, hosting events, and launching online tools that are actually useful. Go cognac!

Case in point: the Cognac Training Toolkit. This is an online course of sorts, split into three levels:

Introductory Level One (VS), for beginners

Intermediate Level Two (VSOP), aimed at those who need a deeper knowledge of Cognac for work or pleasure

Advanced Level Three (XO), aimed at professionals, journalists and students in advanced courses.

The "courses" are more like good PDF text outlines and accompanying Powerpoint slides, so you don't really get the narrative but instead the key facts and figures about cognac in either beginning, intermediate, or professional length. The translations into English aren't perfect by a long shot, but it seems you can understand what they're saying fine enough.

I started reading the Advanced level course and it looks really informative. I've read a couple books on cognac lately so I'll probably skip the rest for now, but should I ever need to check a fact, I think this will be the place I'll go.  

The Cognac Training Toolkits are here.

Cognac by Salvatore Calabrese Book Review

This fall I visited the Cognac region of France. Also the trip was Salvatore Calabrese, owner of Fifty in London, where I visited a year ago on a trip with Plymouth Gin. In preparation for Cognac I read the book Cognac by Nicholas Faith because Calabrese's book is a lot bigger and didn't fit in my luggage.

Also, I thought Calabrese's book Cognac: A Liquid History wasn't going to be very good. It has beautiful pictures on just about every page and large font with large spacing between sentences, so I assumed it was going to be light on the content.

Not so much. The book is actually has most of the information as in Faith's journalistic book, just written more in narrative style than in charts and graphs. This is very fitting with Calabrese's personality- he's one of those bartenders who is a master of service and a lover of the romance of cocktails. 

I particularly liked his detailed timeline of what seems like every event in the history of cognac. Another strong point is his description and tasting notes on pre-Phylloxera cognacs (Phylloxera his the region approximately 1860-1900, wiping out the entire industry). Calabrese's bar specializes in these very rare, very expensive cognacs and he has tasted more of these than most people.

Also very cool were his generalized tasting notes. He describes different colors, aromas, and flavors in cognac of different ages from five to 20 years. This should help me (and others) identify the age of cognac by the flavors.

I suppose the downside of this book is that the index isn't very good and the information is scattered throughout the narrative, making it difficult to find particular bits of information. It is a very good book about cognac; it's just not written as a reference book.

Glossy Booze: Big October Edition

Glossy Booze is a regular Alcademics feature in which I cover the liquor coverage in glossy magazines.

Bon Appetit (October)lists a recipe for the Highland's Fall from Peter Vestinos, available here. Also, a story on dry cider and one on dessert wines. In November St. John Frizell has a recipe for the coffee/rum drink Koffie Van Brunt.

Everyday With Rachael Ray (October) has a story on "gum cocktails"- not something you get at Tailor, but combining flavors of gum to make new flavors.

GQ (September) had a big feature on the six best drinking cities in the US. They were San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, Portland (OR), Nashville, and New York.

Conde Nast Traveler has a list of three tropical island bars in the Bahamas, plus a recipe for the Goombay Smash.

7X7 (September) has a story on Rickhouse. In the October issue, Jordan Mackay writes about relocated NYC sommelier David Lynch. 

Men's Journal (October) list America's best beers here, and the top five beer towns here.

Sunset (October) has beer and food pairings for Octoberfest, and a story on green wine packaging.

Esquire has a recipe for the Grasshopper. Really!

Details lists some "really excellent canned beer,"and a few places in which to drink it.

And the winner for best drink coverage goes to Food & Wine- and they didn't even have any cocktail recipes. Their stories are:

• What sommeliers know best.
•  Understanding Oregon Pinot Noir country
• Wineries by the sea all over the world- France and Spain, US, Australia, Portugal, and South Africa.
• Wines for drinking, not overthinking
• American Wine Awards
• A preview of the F&W Wine Guide 2010
• How to be a smarter wine shopper
• Gruner Veltliner
• 50 classic wines to try
• 15 rules for wine and food pairings

A Visit to Cognac Paul Giraud

My final visit in the Cognac region of France was to the house of Paul Giraud- quite literally his house. In my brief visit we first learned about Giraud's philsoophy: while other houses try to use blending to get a round and multi-faceted flavor profile, Giraud tries to emphasize particular flavors in each bottling. 

I found a commonality in all the Giraud cognacs though, a strawberry rhubarb creaminess. The Naopleon bottling is meant to emphasize the grape flower aromas, whereas the Vielle Reseve (labeled as XO in the US) emphasizes fruitiness with flavors that change from fresh to dried plum as the spirit warms up in the glass. The Tres Rare bottling, which is delicious, 49 years old and emphasizes spice on the palate. 

Paul Giraud is located in the beautiful little town of Bouteville. There the brand (it's all estate-grown grapes in their products) owns 40 hectares, and they actually harvest about half of their grapes by hand instead of machine. 

Some of the aging cellars are located right next to a stream, keeping them cool and humid year-round. In this cellar like all of them in Cognac, we saw spiders all around. They love spiders in cognac cellars (surely you've seen webs in my other pictures) as they eat the bugs that otherwise may eat through the wood in the barrels. 

You know, maybe I should start using that excuse not to clean my apartment- I'm just trying to protect the furniture.

Otard Cognac Visit

Last month I took a big trip to Cognac to learn about cognac. One of the many houses I visited was Otard. This cognac house is located in the former fortifying castle of Cognac in which Francois the First was born, on the Charente River next door to Hennessy.

A tour of Otard is part castle and city history tour, and part cognac tasting. The castle dates back centuries, but my interest really begins when it was purchased by the Otard family after the French revolution.

In the basement of the building are the aging cellars. As the river is running right next to the building, the cellars have 90 percent humidity, which the cellar master likes very much. 

Otard buys eau de vie from the first four delimited regions- Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Borderies, and Fine Bois. On this visit we were able to taste raw spirit from three of them. As noted previously, grapes from the Fine Bois produce spirit that is fruity and aromatic right off the bat, but does't age well for long periods of time. You'd could definitely taste this as a fruity, tasty grape spirit.

The raw spirit from Grande Champagne was what I'd call tight- seems like you'd want to dilute it a bit to release the aromas. This they tease out after aging in oak. The spirit from the Borderies was, as it's supposed to be, very floral like lily or violet. Many brands use Borderies spirit to add this flavor to their blends.

Otard is available in the US but not widely so. They do a lot of business at duty-free shops and in Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Otard also has a release Otard 55 that San Francisco bartenders recommended I try, as it is "natural strength" at 55 percent alcohol compared with the usual 40.  This could be great for mixing into cocktails, but I'm afraid I have bad news guys: This bottling is being discontinued, as they say there was too much consumer confusion about it. Maybe they should have labeled it "Bartender's Blend" instead...

A Visit to Courvoisier Cognac

On a recent trip to France, I stopped in to Courvoisier cognac for a visit. Courvoisier is located not in the city of Cognac, but in Jarnac- one of the two other main cognac towns along with Segonzac. Jarnac appears to be a bigger city than Cognac and looks a bit more lively. I popped in to the tourism office and was told they don't really have any hotels in the city itself, just bed and breakfasts. The real hotels are the fancy chateaus a few miles outside the city.

Courvoisier dominates the Charente river waterfront here as Hennessy does in Cognac. Can you believe this picture isn't a postcard?

The house of Courvoisier is just as beautiful inside as it appears on the outside, though they have a bit of Napoleon overdose in the design theme. Courvoisier was the official supplier of cognac to Napoleon or some such, and they really are running with that. In the visitor's center downstairs, they even have one of his famous hats. (Branding suggestion to Courvoisier: make the Napoleon hat the bartender's new fedora.)

Courvoisier only purchases grapes for its cognac from the inner four delimited cognac regions- Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Borderies, and Fine Bois. They own two distilleries but work with several others to produce the eau de vie that will go into their bottles.

A unique thing about Courvoisier is that they pick out the trees that are used to make their barrels, then have them built especially for their use. (Most companies just buy barrels.) They use the traditional Limousin and Troncais forest trees, along with some from Jupille. 

While there, we were treated to the La Nez de Courvoisier experience. Basically they take you into a groovy lounge, blindfold you, and blow smells in your face. You have a glass of cognac in front of you and the goal is to try to identify those same aromas in the cognac. They're bringing the La Nez de Courvoisier on the road in the US, but by the time you read this post they will all have happened.