March 2009

Drinks with Personality: Tequila

Several years ago when I was but a wee college freshman, my sister gave me some well-meaning advice. It was a common rhyming adage, "Liquor before beer, you're in the clear. Beer before liquor, never been sicker." This is the very definition of a factoid. It's something that sounds like it should be true, especially because it's so simple and concise. All the same, it's what a drill sergeant trying to look good for TV cameras would call "bull-hockey". The order in which a series of drinks is imbibed has no discernible affect on the drinker's well-being. The fact is, drinking is something we have to learn to do, and the only true lesson is the hands-on variety. People get ruined on certain drinks because they're inexperienced and they drink it incorrectly. Like most animals, humans aren't immune to operant conditioning. At the tender age of 19, I rendered myself incapable of ever consuming gin again. It's not just because I got drunk on the stuff, either.

Bloody Mary

There are at least two creation myths for the Bloody Mary; one, that producer and song writer George Jessel created the first by adding vodka to his tomato juice in his apartment in Palm Beach in 1927. But in 1926 an American bartender named Fernand Petiot was working at Harry's New York Bar in Pairs, the exceedingly famous drinking hole favored by the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, was mixing a cocktail made of equal parts of tomato juice and vodka. Later, in 1934, back in the U.S. in a real New York bar, the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in New York, Petiot spiced up the drink, now known as the Bloody Mary despite the hotel's attempt to change it "Red Snapper," by adding cayenne pepper, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, lemon, and a big dash of Tabasco. It increases in popularity, rapidly. Then, in 1950, George Jessel takes out an ad in Collier's that assumes credit for inventing the drink. Then, on July 19, 1964, Petiot tells the New Yorker:

The perfect vodka martini!

Okay, I left off last time with a ringing endorsement for the classic gin martini. At risk of sounding like a heretic, I have to admit that my absolute personal favorite martini is a vodka martini, very dry, dirty, with three bleu cheese-stuffed olives. Now, this isn't something I discovered on my own. I had a pal who swore solemnly to me over a year ago that no matter how weird it sounded, it was absolutely the best vodka martini she'd ever had. I'd honestly sort of forgotten, until I ordered a dirty vodka martini in a bar known for excellent martinis a short time ago, and they brought me precisely the martini my friend had described, garnished with bleu cheese-stuffed olives.

The perfect martini at home

Hunt for the Perfect Martini

I've recently discovered martinis. Not the fruity concoctions served in a martini glass—lemondrops, cosmopolitans, or other cocktails. Not the various flavored vodkas so fashionable for chocolate "martinis" or appletinis, and so on. While those are perfectly legitimate cocktails, they're served in a martini glass, and they're well worth exploring—they aren't what I mean when I say "martini".

Nope, I mean the good old-fashioned James Bond-style martini. The classic, traditional martini means gin.

Let's talk about different gins for just a minute while I'm thinking about it. I'm one of those people who, if I can't afford the good stuff, would rather just wait until I can. So if your preferred hootch is that clear mystery-mix in a plastic bottle that tastes like nothing so much as it tastes like lighter-fluid, this probably isn't the post for you.

So for our purposes, when I say "gin" I mean Bombay Sapphire dry gin.