Put Grapes In This Negroni-Like Summer Sour
Also: A grape Margarita!
Links About Drinks
Younger bar goers don’t want to start tabs, reports The New York Times: “The pair might order more drinks later on, but the prospect of opening a tab was verboten. ‘Why leave a credit card with the bar? I don’t know if I’m going to be here that long, so I don’t want to leave a tab open,’ Mr. Korinke said, joking that he had ‘commitment issues.’”
The CEO of Brown-Forman, which owns liquor brands like Jack Daniels, is warning of challenging times and economic “headwinds” ahead. Tariffs, economic turbulence—these are all real issues for the spirits industry. But I also suspect the whiskey boom of the last few years is coming to an end.
Is this creamsickle the Drink of the Summer?
Smashing Successes
This week’s cocktail is not a smash.
There’s no mint. It’s not served over crushed ice. You don’t even have to muddle anything, except possibly your thoughts.
But like the smashes we’ve been looking at for the past several weeks, it demonstrates the value of adding produce to your cocktails, allowing you to spruce up drinks with ingredients you might already have in your fridge or fruit bowl—or that can easily be obtained at any grocery store.
In this case, that ingredient is grapes. Just ordinary green seedless grapes from your local market.
I am always on the hunt for novel ingredients to use in cocktails, and I am particularly interested in novel ingredients that are inexpensive and easy to obtain. Grapes check all the relevant boxes here. Also, grapes are tasty and pleasant enough on their own. Why would anyone would associate them with wrath?
We don’t usually keep grapes around the house because they can be toxic to dogs, and our very large pups like to snarf up just about anything that touches the floor. Better safe than sorry.
But I was attracted to this drink partly because I had never seen a cocktail recipe with grapes before—or at least not one that looked like it could possibly taste good.
I was also interested in this cocktail because it’s a bitter sour—made with gin and Campari, plus the usual lemon juice and syrup—and I am something of a maniac, in a totally appropriate way, for that general subcategory of drink.
What Cookie Monster is for cookies, I am for lower-ABV amaro sours.
It turns out that a handful of grapes adds a zesty, bright note to an amaro sour, lifting and brightening it. It doesn’t quite match the tang and tartness of adding raspberries to a drink, but the result is somewhat similar, except more, well, grape-y. Which in some ways makes this drink a little bit more Negroni-like, since it adds a grape-y roundness to the drink that you otherwise get from vermouth (or, in some variations, a different form of fortified wine).
Turns out adding grapes is a…grape idea? (Maybe I need to workshop that one a little bit more.)
In any case, after I made this drink, I had a version of the thought I often have when trying a new ingredient: What else can grapes do?
So today we are going to look at a bitter sour with grapes, and then try not one but two more grape cocktails, including a Margarita variation and a refreshing, effervescent historical number with Champagne.
We don’t feature many Champagne cocktails in this newsletter, but this one was particularly fun and tasty.
Even if you’re not a fan of amaro sours—amaros sour?—you’ll find something to like.
Grape cocktails. I’m telling you, they’re a good bunch!
Grape Fear
So much of making cocktails well is just about managing sweetness. I talk about calibrating sweetness a lot in this newsletter, because it’s important for making taste good. Also, because people have a lot of opinions about sweet cocktails.
Using grapes in cocktails requires managing sweetness. And it provides a good a opportunity for thinking about how to get sweetness right.
In a very basic sour (spirit, sugar/syrup, lemon or lime juice), you balance the sweetness of the syrup against the sourness of citrus, with a base of strong liquor.
As anyone who makes cocktails regularly probably knows, a very basic sour structure looks like this 8:3:3 ratio:
¾ ounce lemon/lime
¾ ounce syrup
2 ounces spirit base
Sometimes the syrup, citrus, or both get boosted to an ounce—2:1:1 is a common ratio as well. But this is a pretty conventional starting place for sour-class cocktails. This should all be familiar to regular readers.
Adding grapes changes the sweetness of your cocktails in ways that affect other elements in the drink.
Grapes fall on the sweeter side of the fruit spectrum. Concord grapes—the sort of table grapes you might eat as a snack—measure an average Brix level of about 20 (though this can vary somewhat), compared to, say, raspberries, which come in around 10 or a little less.
Brix is basically a general measure of sugar content that, for cocktail purposes, gives you a numerical sense of how much sweetness is being added to a drink.