The Aperitif Guy

Italy marks 15th August with a holiday. Strictly speaking, it's the feast of the Assumption, an important religious festival for Catholics. However, you'd be hard pushed to find an Italian who uses that name for it. Throughout the country it's known as Ferragosto - the feasts of Augustus. Romans have been enjoying a summer break since the very first emperor provided games and other entertainments at this time of year to maintain his popularity. Nowadays the word applies to both the Assumption day holiday and the fortnight's break that most locals take following it. The Beloved and I love visiting Italy. Being lovers of good food and wine, it’s natural that much of our holidays (and cash) are spent enjoying the local cuisine. Over the years, I’ve started to notice something in the Italian approach to food that you don’t spot at first. Every good cook knows that you’re supposed to take quality ingredients and let them shine, but nobody really tells you what that means. O...

The Beloved and I became civil partners in 2006. We were amongst the first people to do so, within a few months of the law changing. Because it was such a new thing, there were no established conventions or traditions for what should happen at such a celebration. In many ways, it was nice to build our day from scratch. We kept the invitation list short, just immediate family, and treated everyone to lunch afterwards. Obviously, it was important to us to serve an aperitif before lunch, but what to have? Both sherry and Champagne seemed more formal than the atmosphere we wanted to create for our day. I can't remember which of us first suggested the Dream cocktail, but as soon as it was mentioned we both knew it was the perfect aperitif for us. We had encountered the Dream cocktail the previous summer, in Salvatore Calabrese's Classic Summer Cocktails , and we fell for it immediately. It combines one of my favourite cocktail ingredients - Dubonnet - with citrus fla...

The Beloved and I sat up watching the BAFTAs last evening, and next weekend we can look forward to the glamour and excitement of the Oscar award ceremony. It got me thinking about drinks to celebrate films and film actors. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Kath, is an avid film fan. Avid, as in obsessed and indiscriminate. She seems to know everything there is to know about every obscure film and has an encyclopedic knowledge of Oscar statistics. She’s also a cocktail fan. Over the years, we’ve tried old cocktails together, invented new ones, compared variations and generally done untold damage to a pair of no-longer-young livers. A conversation with Kath gave rise to the following ideas. It's too easy to name the vodka martini as the film cocktail. However, Bond ordered a variation on the martini in Fleming’s original James Bond novel, Casino Royale, something he would never do on film until Daniel Craig took the role. In his variant, Bond calls for a mixture of vodka wit...

There’s something very wonderfully decadent about a Champagne-based cocktail. It can be a perfect way to start an evening and, depending what you want in the mix, can take you in all kinds of directions: deeply romantic, sensual or just plain giddy. Whatever your plans for marking the New Year, there's a fizzy drink to help you on your way. Hélène de Troie Pour a measure of rose-flavour liqueur into the bottom of a Champagne glass and top up with pink champagne. Garnish with a rose petal. This has got to be the most romantic cocktail I know. It’s been a favourite of mine since I first tried it in a Greek restaurant in France. (The name means “Helen of Troy.”) It has a deep pink colour and smells of damask roses.  This is the cocktail to serve if you're planning a New Year's Eve a proposal. I make it with French Crème de Rose liqueur (available online or in specialist cocktail shops). It has a deep colour and very strong flavour of roses. Italian rosolio liqueur is...

It's that time of year again when we love to let go, throw frivolous or outrageous parties and bring something special to our table. It's a good time to serve cocktails, so I've been thinking about what I should suggest as my festive selection for 2019. Here are the ones I love to serve and drink. They include a few you could serve together at a cocktail party, some that are particularly suited to aperitif drinking and one that's great for winding down when the guests have gone. You'll notice a lot of overlap in the ingredients for these cocktails. The main reason for that is my love of certain spirits and liqueurs for their flavour and versatility. It's also so that you can put together a stylish cocktail party without buying a large number of different ingredients. The manufacturers of these ingredients have not sponsored me in any way, save by supplying a couple of photos for the blog. Three White Ladies The original White Lady cocktail is a thing of s...

A few months ago, I wrote about our visit to The Lakes Distillery and my fascination with the approach their Whiskymaker takes to maturing and blending whisky. You can read that post here:  http://blog.theaperitifguy.co.uk/2019/08/a-distillery-visit.html Whiskymaker Dhavall Gandhi (image courtesy of the Lakes Distillery) I was contacted again by the Lakes Distillery to inform me that their first widely available single malt whisky has been released. The whisky has been named The Whiskymaker's Reserve No1, the first in a series of limited releases showing off the skills of Dhavall Gandhi, the whiskymaker whose approach so fascinated me in the summer. Since the communication from The Lakes also offered a sample for tasting and review, I couldn't resist accepting! If you follow me on Twitter, you will have read my impressions the evening I opened the bottle. Having said in August that The One was not my style of whisky, preferring as I do a more peaty taste, I was exp...

Autumn is my favourite time of the year for cooking and entertaining. I love to cook with wild mushrooms, orchard fruits, game birds and nuts. Autumn flowers may be hard to come by, but squashes, pumpkins and displays of golden foliage can bring great beauty to your table. Now's the time to let go of my preference for white linen and reach for the cinnamon-red tablecloth, or even a deep brown one. I've been thinking about the flavours I particularly associate with autumn and how we might bring them to the aperitif table. I'll look at four flavours in particular: smoke, apples, pears and blackberries. Smoke Smoked foods of all descriptions make for delicious aperitif nibbles. Simple cubes of smoked cheddar cheese are lovely with a sweet white wine. Look for something with a hint of apple, like a late harvest chenin blanc. Don't ever be afraid of serving a sweet wine as an aperitif. As well as wine, port, Madeira and sherry can all bring a touch of sophisticatio...

We often think of the 1920s as the heyday of cocktail drinking. This is partly because the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and possession of alcohol in the USA, from 1917 to 1933, drove many wealthy Americans to seek refreshment in the hotels and restaurants of the European capitals. The strength of mixed drinks, and their endless variations of flavour and colour, seemed to fit with the mood of cities rediscovering joy after the horrors of the Great War. The leisured classes relished the fun and frivolity of cocktails and could afford to patronise bars that employed expert cocktail waiters, who were starting to be feted as celebrities.  That's not where cocktails began, though. The earliest known evidence of the word being used to refer to alcohol comes from the Balance and Columbian Repository , a New York newspaper, when the editor answered the question "What is a cocktail?" thus:      "Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any...

Over the years, I've visited a few whisky distilleries. The highlands and islands of Scotland, in particular, are home to many distilleries, set in beautiful surroundings, which have seen commercial advantages to receiving visitors. Until this year, I hadn't been inside a gin distillery, though, and I thought it about time I rectified that. (Pardon the pun.)  Photo courtesy of The Lakes Distillery As luck would have it, I discovered the Lakes Distillery, through their exceptionally clean-tasting gin. Then I discovered that they are open to tourists and even have a bistro on site. Perfect. We booked ourselves in for a distillery tour - and lunch in the Bistro - on the way home from a weekend away. We were blessed with a quiet day and the wisdom to book a morning tour. Not only did this provide us with an ideal aperitif before lunch, it meant we had the tour guide to ourselves. We could ask trivial questions, probing questions, follow tangents and cause our guide a gi...

This week marked 243 years since the English-speaking colonists on the American continent declared themselves independent of the British crown and organised themselves into a new nation. Whichever side of the Atlantic we live (or the Pacific, for that matter), whatever our tastes in cinema or music, whatever we think of this or that figure in American politics, culture or history, we still have much to admire in the USA, with its high, founding ideals of individual liberty, just government and responsible citizenship. For those of us with a taste for mixed drinks, July is a time to raise a toast to the United States for the gift of the cocktail. There is evidence from as far back as 1806 of mixed drinks being called "cocktails," and an answer in a newspaper column to a request for a definition of the word gives a recipe for a spirit mixed with sugar, water and Angostura bitters. That seems to have fallen out of favour for a while, and by the 1860s, bars were selling Dut...