Secret histories of cities and spirits

Nothing focuses the mind quite like a deadline and deadlines don't care about royal weddings or bank holidays. On top of that, they can be sneaky little buggers and so it turns out that the entry deadline for Bols Genever's Classic Cocktail competition passes on 1st May (UK only, I think) and while I've dabbled with the spirit in the past, I wanted to put new together.

In this case, "new" is a relative term. After all, they called it the Bols Genever Classic Cocktail Competition, so classic gin and genever based drinks were on my mind. I've just invested in a bottle of Campari so Negronis were never far from my thoughts and the New York thing led me to look at the Bronx.

I should probably explain the New York thing.

Famously, New York hasn't always been New York. The town that would become the city that never sleeps was first established by Dutch settlers under the name New Amsterdam at a time when a large number of the ships exploring the possibilities of the New World were flying the flag of the Netherlands. The name changed when the colony of New Netherland - of which New Amsterdam was the capital - was provisionally ceded to the British in 1664, and finally stuck ten years later.

Oh, this is fun. This is the good old days of throwing together random thoughts and providing a tenuous link back to booze.

There's a thematic link here to genever because genever is the New Amsterdam to gin's New York; everyone knows the latter, everyone loves the latter but you don't get to the latter unless you go through the former. No New Amsterdam, no New York. No genever, no gin.

And that's why I was thinking about the Bronx cocktail. But I couldn't let go of that Campari element - after all, if we're thinking about what happens if you give up what turns out to be one of the greatest cities on Earth, there's likely to be some bitterness.

The Stuyvesant

35ml Bols Genever
20ml Campari
25ml freshly squeezed orange juice
25ml freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 barspoons acacia honey (might need less/more depending on the acidity of your lemons and oranges)
10ml egg white

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice to emulsify. Add ice and shake; fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

(Named for Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Director-General of the colony of New Netherland.)

Moving on with Lillet

I stopped by a fairly informal tasting session with Sébastian Martinon of Lillet last week. He was on a flying visit from France and had asked to see somewhere outside of London; Edinburgh's not a bad choice, but I'm pretty biased. (I'm also pretty biased because the tasting took place in the private lounge at Sygn.)

Lillet was founded in 1872 by two brothers who had made themselves a career as wine merchants. Right now, it's probably more famous for what it was rather than what it is - and you can blame James Bond for that.

Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.

This recipe, given to the bartender at the Royale-Les-Eaux casino by 007 in his début, represents something of a dilemma for the cocktail bartender. I've lost count of the number of people who've asked for a "vodka Martini, shaken - not stirred" in the months after the release of a Bond film without really knowing what they were getting themselves into. We, members of the secret brother/sisterhood of bar geeks, would roll our eyes, knowing that Bond didn't drink vodka Martinis. He drank Vespers - and he'd do it alone, because Kina Lillet wasn't available anymore.

The "Kina" refers to quinine, which was the only ingredient other than citrus liqueurs and Bordeaux that I can remember Sébastian referring to through the tasting. When the recipe was reformulated in 1987, the level of quinine was reduced - not completely removed; there's still a pleasant bitterness across the range - and the product was relaunched as Lillet Blanc. It's said to be less bitter and less sweet than Kina Lillet, but I haven't got a frame of reference - I've never tried Kina Lillet and the opportunity to do so seems pretty unlikely if they stopped making it almost a quarter of a century ago.

We tasted three expressions of the aperitif - the Blanc, the Rouge and the 2006 Vintage Jean de Lillet Blanc. They're all made in a similar way, adding a fruit liqueur flavoured with a range of citrus peels, quinine and other, secret aromatics to Bordeaux wine. All three offer a deep citrus flavour with more sweetness than I'd expected and a touch of bitterness, but each also has distinct characteristics that I'd guess are attributable to the wines used. The Blanc is refreshing and light; the Rouge is richer and slightly tannic. The Jean de Lillet is only made when the company's maître de chai comes across a wine good enough to be commemorated. The 2006 vintage we tasted seemed more rounded and slightly more bitter than the Blanc. For anyone who's wondering why it's not in the photo, it proved to be the most popular bottle in the room.

France is Lillet's main market and over there they drink it straight-up, chilled but it's often hard for me not to try something out in a mixed drink. Gin, particularly something juniper- and citrus-heavy like No. 3, seemed like a natural choice, and the recipe wrote itself from there.

Tesseract

35ml No. 3 Gin
25ml Lillet Blanc
1 dash Peychaud's Bitters
20ml lemon juice
10ml sugar syrup (2:1)

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Garnish with an orange zest twist.

Outbound: halfway out of the dark

I can't quite recall who it was now—maybe Linford Christie?—but a couple of years back some athlete, having found himself in hard times, recounted his terrible tale of woe and explained that his burdens had become so difficult to bear that he was drinking a bottle of wine a day. The revelation was supposed to illustrate just how far the fellow had fallen, but all I could think was, a bottle of wine a day? I have a bottle of wine with dinner. - Alex Balk

One in ten Britons drinks every day, via The Awl. // Seasonal advice from Apocalypstick - how to avoid getting too drunk; how to tell if you're drunk. // Purl's Tristan Stephenson on raising the bar, and theatre and multi-sensory perception. // Ron Jeremy has a rum, via Liqurious. // Five shocking facts about what drinking does to your body. // Via MeFi: from the minds who brought you the MacNugget-tini; Club BACARDI (c. 1996)