Some friends gave me as a present Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Fantastic book. What’s remarkable is Haigh’s research – how to obtain those ingredients for vintage drinks, what liquors have changed their recipe over the years, or what obscure terms like gomme syrup refer to. It’s a must have, though less as a bartending guide or reference for recipes than for a sensibility. It’s as much about bringing quality of spirits back as reviving forgotten recipes.

One thing that struck me was his manifesto in the opening. After lamenting the lack of knowledge among (most) professional bartenders, he writes:

We, as modern consumers, also still have some work to do. As a culture, we are quickly forgetting how to gain acquired tastes. If something taste bitter or sharp it is bypassed for an easier-to-contemplate taste sensation. The majority of modern drinks are designed to utterly hide any tang of alcohol, much less the sharp piquant acquired taste of gin – and it’s not just gin we’re talking about either. It’s brandy, whiskey, and tequila, too.

One of the major beefs I have – you may already have noticed – is the stifling fashion these days for clear, sweet vodka cocktails. It’s not simply my purism about what gets called a martini. And it’s not a snobbery about fruit or sweetness per se. The reason I detest this trend is that it treats spirits as simply a neutral basis for whatever flavor, natural or artificial, people want to toss in.

What gets lost are the spirits themselves. Consider the range of flavors and qualities that spirits at their best bring to the cocktail:

• Body: Brandy, whiskey, and aged rum all have a warmth and mellowness. Isaac at DC Drinks explains: it’s the oak aging. “While it’s a normal part of developing the drinker’s palate to start with the colorless and odorless stuff,” he writes, “once you’ve had a taste of the complexity imbued by oak its hard to return to the watery, clear substances.”
• Herbal notes: I wouldn’t go as far as Isaac in eschewing all clear liquors. Gin is probably my favorite basic spirit; it’s highly distilled, but I love its dryness and its juniper flavor. It never ceases to surprise me in its ability to support other flavors in a cocktail. Liqueurs like Chartreuse or amaro have the complexity of oak-aged bourbon, just not its mellowness. Pimm’s even simulates the color and body of an aged spirit despite being made from gin.
• Complexity: Even fruit liqueurs gain from well-crafted production. Whereas cheap liqueur and even infusion can reduce fruit flavors to a two-dimensional axis of sugar and acidity, a good fruit-based spirit is a reminder that fruit flavors are more than sweet and tart. Some, like Cointreau, give a whole bouquet of aroma to what would otherwise be simply “orange” flavor. Others, like maraschino liqueur, take the fruit into unexpected directions.

Why should one bother going through the trouble to acquire tastes? Because it lets you enjoy the taste of the spirits instead of covering them up. Because drinking for the flavor can be a part of drinking more moderately; as Haigh notes, the oversized cocktail came part and parcel with the neutral spirits trend. Because an inspired flavor combination, made with quality ingredients, is more sophisticated than something which needs the special glass to tart it up.

Of course, even with effort, not all tastes can be acquired. No matter how I try Fernet-Branca - with tons of soda, smothered in lemon; mixed with other amaro; or in some vintage Fernet-Branca cocktail - well it still tastes awful to me. But for every Fernet-Brance, there’s a maraschino liqueur or a Campari… something that’s odd or offputting at first but that soon I grow to love.