Odd Bacchus

An all-inclusive cruise ship can be a dangerous place. It’s all too easy to overindulge, particularly when certain staff members seem determined to convince you to have yet another glass of wine with dinner. Do they get paid more if they pour more free wine?

When my liver is thus imperiled for a week, I avoid hard liquor and drink only wine (and the occasional glass of water). I did make an exception on this journey with Silversea, when the bartender Marwell convinced me to imbibe a delicious “Grand Champagne Cocktail” one night before dinner. I’d sampled plain ol’ Champagne Cocktails before and enjoyed them, and I was intrigued to see how Marwell would make it “Grand.”

A standard Champagne Cocktail starts with a cube of sugar at the bottom of a champagne flute. Soak the cube with a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters, top off with Champagne, and voilà! A most elegant aperitif. You can also goose this recipe with the addition of a little Cognac, measuring in about 1/5 as much Cognac as Champagne.

But a cruise is no place to show restraint, so Marwell took it yet further with a splash of Grand Marnier. The resulting Grand Champagne Cocktail (also called a “Night and Day“) tastes complex, deep and lively, and it packs a surprising punch. One of these is plenty before dinner.

It’s rare to see Champagne Cocktails on drink menus nowadays, and when they do appear, it tends to be expensive. All the more reason then to give this drink a try at your next party. You can prepare flutes with bitters-soaked sugar cubes in advance, and add the other ingredients as guests arrive. There’s no need to invest in an expensive Champagne for this cocktail; a dry Cava or Prosecco could also work quiet well (but given a choice, I’d opt for Cava, since its bubbles will stand up to the Cognac and Grand Marnier better).

Presented with this cocktail, your guests will surely be impressed and delighted. And because the liquors make the drink surprisingly strong, a Grand Champagne Cocktail will get your party off to a lively start.

Every now and then I like to escape from the keyboard for a while and do a little fieldwork. While I’m away researching Sardinian Cannonau and Minorcan gin, I would encourage you to do a some research of your own. Go into a wine shop you like and ask for something weird but tasty. Often they’ll have some oddball gem they found at a tasting that they would love to share.

Of course, you’ve probably tried a number of odd drinks in the past already, and I would love to hear about your experiences. Feel free to send me an e-mail about an offbeat wine, spirit or cocktail you’ve tried, and I’ll post some of the stories to this blog. You can reach me at [email protected].

If you don’t have a good story, well, now is an excellent time to make one. Get out there and drink something weird!

I’ll be back on May 5. Cheers!

Last June, I wrote about Ohio’s Lake Erie Islands, which wine critic Frank Schoonmaker highlighted as an important viticultural region in a 1941 issue of Gourmet. But even then, Schoonmaker lamented the lost potential of these islands, which feature unusually favorable terroir for certain grape varieties. Prohibition killed off a number of wineries, and most of those that remained in the mid-20th century were apparently lazy or incompetent. According to Schoonmaker, “Too many – far too many – wines are falsified, are heavily dosed with sugar, or are blended with cheap California wines.”

With significantly declining acreage devoted to vineyards, I had basically written off these romantic-sounding islands. What a pleasant surprise then, to come across a bottle of 2010 Firelands Gewürztraminer from Isle St. George. Also known more prosaically as North Bass Island, Isle St. George achieved AVA (American Viticultural Area) status in 1982, and vineyards currently cover more than half the island.

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It was one year ago that I walked into In Fine Spirits, asked for their weirdest bottle, and came away with a deliciously velvety Jović Vranac from Serbia. That inspiring find pushed me over the edge into hardcore bloggery, and now, 117 posts later, I continue to milk this blog as an excuse to drink any oddball booze that catches my fancy.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you people who actually read this thing, and to also take stock and see what’s been catching your fancy. Some of my posts are much, much more popular than others, and it’s fascinating to see what drinks people are most interested in reading about.

It was a big surprise to see my post about Becherovka, an herbal Czech liquor which is tasty with tonic, rank at #11. No cocktail posts made it into the top 10, but the posts about Chicago’s Koval Distillery and the “Hidden Gems of Cognac” came in at #6 and #7, respectively.

A piece about the glories of Virginia Viognier made it to #8, but all the other top wine posts — #2, #4, #5 and #10 — were all about wines and spirits from Serbia! Who knew?

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