A Pair of Apricot Martinis — and Types of Fruity Booze

If you can make an apricot Manhattan, you can make an apricot Martini.

As you browse cocktail recipes, you will inevitably come across recipes that call for fruit liqueur or fruit eau de vie. 

When you encounter these sorts of recipes, you might experience a bit of confusion: Is there a difference between a fruit eau de vie and a fruit liqueur? Can you swap one for the other in a cocktail? 

The short answer is that they are, in fact, quite different: An eau de vie is an unsweetened spirits distilled from fruit, something along the lines of cognac or Pisco. An eau de vie is typically used as a base ingredient, often in split-base combos with other spirits. 

Fruit liqueurs, on the other hand, are flavored and sweetened. Sweetness levels vary, but they are often quite sweet — to the point where you can almost think of them as comparable, at least in terms of how they function in a cocktail, to syrup or vermouth. 

If you think of the Old Fashioned format as the most basic form of the cocktail — spirit, sugar, bitters — the liqueurs serve as the sugar, while an eau de vie serves as the spirit. 

To illustrate the difference, we’ll look at a pair of gently sweet fruited Martini variations, both of which use apricot booze. One uses an apricot eau de vie as part of the base, along with gin. The other uses apricot liqueur as part of the sweetener/modifier, along with vermouth. Together, they demonstrate the difference between the two categories of fruit booze in ways that should help you use them in your own cocktails. 

These cocktails are both quite easy to make once you have the ingredients. And because they are both somewhat sweeter than a standard dry Martini, they might appeal to people who find no-frills Martinis too dry and bracing. 

You can also think of both of this week’s cocktails as extensions or inversions of the fruited Manhattans we have been looking at for the last month or two: After all, as I have often argued, the Manhattan and the Martini are just negative images of each other. So if you can make an apricot Manhattan, you can also make an apricot Martini. 

Apricot or Not

Speaking of apricot Manhattans, the first drink we’ll look at this week comes from the creator of the Slope, Julie Reiner, who has made apricot a signature element in her cocktails.