Check out this recipe for a relatively easy (no gum Arabic required!) bowl of Pisco Punch by the Pegu Club's Audrey Saunders. The recipe if for a bowl of punch but with the way it's put together you could make individual portions. It''s part of a series of holiday punches from New York Magazine.
Mmm, Holiday pisco.
Vodka can be made from most anything- corn, wheat, potatoes, grapes, maple syrup, honey, molasses, sugar beets, etc. But it is distilled to high proof to remove most flavor, and most of these base materials don't come in a lower distillation proof, unaged form. (Barring corn likker, of course.)
But trying some recent products made me realize there is a closer boundary between pisco and vodka. Pisco 100 is a brand I've written about before that's a very light, sweet, floral pisco. At the SF World Spirits Competition Double Gold Winner tasting event in San Francisco a while back, I sampled Primo Vodka. It is an Argentinian grape-based vodka that comes in Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chardonnay varieties. The one I tried is very grapey and flavorful for a vodka.
I think in the near future, we're going to have to address vodkas that not only taste like something, they taste like something with which we're already familiar.
This week was big for openings and pisco cocktails. I hit up La Mar early in the week, where I had some pisco drinks and lunch, then the new bar called Pisco just for pisco drinks. This bar was supposed to open in August (I wrote a story about it for that issue of San Francisco Magazine) but they had problems with handicapped accessibility due to the gradient slope of the street outside. (Umm, San Francisco has hills that are kind of hard to work around.) The place was looking groovy and more modern than I expected, but the drinks were lovely- I had the Pisco Punch and the Sideways Sour.
Another bar probably opening this week and also serving a Pisco Punch is Taverna Aventine in the Jackson Square district. The cocktail is on the menu as part of a classic drinks program paying homage to the bar's location right next to two of the most important historical drink sites in SF: Hotaling Street and the Bank Exchange.
The event I attended was a pre-opening party so it's hard to say how it will come together, but the Vintage 415 guys tend to do a good job with this sort of thing.
I also visited the new Nettie's Crab Shack, a big bright space in the Marina District that has no pisco drinks on the menu at all. They're doing a cocktail program with some interesting twists like a Cape Cod made with real cranberries, but they weren't serving them at the pre-party I attended. I'll have to hit them up a second time.
The drink menu is all about pisco, listing 12 pisco-based cocktails. It includes the Pisco Sour and Pisco Punch, of course, but a lot more creative drinks as well. Several of the drinks include chicha morada (a purple corn juice that looks and tastes a bit like purple grape juice), and many of them include passion fruit.
There are some interesting combinations on the list, including the Chilcano de Pisco that's just pisco, ginger ale, and angostura bitters, the Capitan Francisco with pisco, sweet vermouth, and bitters, and the Chicharrita made with pisco, Drambuie, chicha morada, and orange juice. There is also an imitation Cosmopolitan and Bloody Mary in the mix.
I'm not sure how they make their Pisco Punch or the gomme syrup for it, but for the Pisco Sour they throw it in a blender for a brief second to get it nice and frothy, then double-strain it into a glass without ice.
I noticed that they're using BarSol Pisco in the well, and have dozens of bottles of Pisco Vina de Oro on the top shelves. (I haven't tried it yet- could be a paid promotion, could be the good-looking bottle, could be tasty stuff.) There are many other brands of pisco on the shelf, but I forgot to ask the total number.
I went there with Victoria Damato-Moran, who will be the day lead bartender when they open full-time next week. I love that this place has a separate bar area from the restaurant where Victoria will be working, and hope that it won't be chock full of people eating when they should focus on drinking. There's plenty of good stuff to drink there.
