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Fuel for Love: Why HARD LIQUOR Rules

By Amy Martin |

I have a confession: I hate beer. For a Native Texan, that’s almost sacrilegious. To make matters worse, I think wine tastes bad, too. If I sip it briskly, arcing it over the tastebuds and straight into the throat, I can drink a whole glass of white zinfandel, but that’s it. People say they drink wine for the taste. Yeah, right. I think people who drink wine feel guilty about drinking, but they’re not about to sit quiet so they punish themselves in the process by partaking of the bad-tasting stuff. If you have to search for terms like “sprightly grass overtones” and “boisterous bouquet” to describe fermented grape juice, then you need to consider getting a real life.

Instead, make mine hard liquor. Spirits. Booze. All those lovely libations, all those colorful bottles behind the bar full of exotic potions. To blend them is to make flavors dance in a glass- an art, and yet a science so exact it approaches chemistry. That chefs get television shows and bartenders don’t is a crime.

With so many health-conscious types arrayed against us, and so many genuinely tragic stories of people who throw their lives away on the hard stuff, we booze-users do feel the occasional splash of guilt. To ward off the creeping conscience, 1 recite the historical, aesthetic, spiritual, and, yes, ethical properties of booze,

For openers, at least I’m honest. Unlike dainty spritzer-sippers, people who drink hard liquor know that booze has one reason for existing: to supply a good buzz, Not knee-walking, cookie-tossing blasted, hut nicely buzzed, expansively jingled.

Then, too mind expansion via alcohol has a long and worthy history. We once worshipped booze as a god, Bacchus. The original purpose of booze was to get in touch with spirits of the other world, and “spirits” is still the legal term for alcohol. It was Benedictine monks in Italy who created their biting namesake liqueur. And Merlin, remember, was more than a magician: He was a distiller par excellence, and his potions packed more punch than mere mystic incantation.

The alcohol in hard liquor is ethanol, the same stuff that Henry Ford used to fuel the Model T. Vodka is pure ethanol, and even with Ketel One, Holland’s deluxe triple-distilled vodka, or the blue-bottled Skyy, a domestic knockoff, you can still tell that unaged, unflavored grain ethanol is all too close to gasoline. Even when grain spirits are aged in oak barrels to create scotch and whiskies, it comes off as rocket fuel.

Plants with a higher sugar content make mellower booze. I’ve long been hi] > to Eastern European vodka from potatoes, part of the current martini rave. And while Polish Luksusowa is superior to Polish Monopolowa, the Czech vodka Vylet from white sugar beets is better than both. Smoothest of all is France’s Vin vodka from grapes. Take any one of these nongrain vodkas and blend with superfine sugar and Caribbean key lime juice for a transcontinental Kamikaze that qualifies as a werewolf potion.

The source is extra important in hard liquor because the process of distillation reduces a raw substance to its essence, exposing all flaws. Most rums, for example, are distilled from molasses. Sip a daiquiri made with any Appleton Estate rum, all distilled directly from sugar cane, and then taste one made with the finest Bacardi. You’ll catch the difference immediately. Similar to that is Janeiro, a quality brand of cacacha, the sugar-cane liquor from Brazil with overtones of vanilla and other sweet jungle spices.

If 1 had to decide on the best source for distillation, it would be grapes, which can make vodka, brandies, liqueurs, and more. The wildly flavorful armagnac brandy is named for the Latin ars magna, or “great art,” referring to the alchemy that takes place when plain white wine is distilled in copper pots. Armagnac makes a Brandy Alexander that stands up and barks. A unique sparkling liqueur is distilled from the famous Moet & Chandon champagne. From this woman’s point of view, it’s close to being foreplay in a bottle.

When consumed responsibly, spirits can be worlds of fun. Seriously. From Mexico comes Damiani, a honey-gold liqueur made with an herb used for centuries as an aphrodisiac. Passionflower, the preferred aphro-herb of France, is distilled and merged with cognac to create the fruit-juicy refrigerated liquor Alize; mixed in champagne it makes a Mimosa with a bite like Brad Pitt’s celluloid vampire’s. Germany produces Jaegermeister, a dark green, grow-hair-on-your-chest liqueur containing liberal portions of valerian root-the original valium.

What else can I say ? Let’s designate a driver-people who drive drunk deserve their guilt, and worse-and let’s go flying.

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