The Aperitif Guy

As a key carer for my parents, I've continued to see them during the lockdown period. I appreciate that is a rare privilege, and many readers are finding it painful to be separated from family. With Mothers' Day coming up, I wondered what I could contribute and have come up with three delicious, classic cocktails that you can make for her, toast her with on a Zoom call or talk her through, so she can make it for herself with ingredients you've sent her. Let's start with the oldest of the three, the Sherry Cobbler. This will appeal to any mum who loves a good sherry. It is the drink for which the paper drinking straw was invented, and it gets a mention in Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit . It's a refreshing mix of sherry and fruit juice. You can use any juice you enjoy, and I've made it with lots of different juices: pineapple, orange, apple and pear all work very well. It doesn't work well with pale sherries, but is great with Amontillado, Oloroso or cream she...

There is a definite seasonality to my drinking habits. I have commented on it before: how I enjoy sharp and light drinks in the summer months, fino sherry in the sunshine or rosé wine with salads. By the same token, as the temperature drops and the nights grow longer, I naturally incline to darker, more full-bodied drinks in the autumn and winter. It's not just because winter foods tend to be deeper in flavour, although that certainly plays a part, but somehow the mood of the season calls for darker drinks. Even if I'm not drinking with food, I wouldn't think of opening a bottle of lager, dry white wine or crisp sherry. Even gin and tonic are less common for me come November. Shiraz, Malbec and Rioja People will tell you I'm not a fan of rich, heavily-oaked red wines. I think it would be more accurate to say I struggle to match them with food. In the winter months, I'm more likely to open a bottle after supper, or to open one early in the week and take a glass out o...

 " He was a bold man that first ate an oyster." Jonathan Swift I wrote last week about preparing octopus for the table. I'm quite convinced that more people would eat cephalopods like octopus and squid if they knew how to prepare and cook them. I'm less sure that's the case with oysters. For all their aphrodisiac reputation, they're not the prettiest thing; not the sort of thing you would look on and assume to be delicious. I suspect the first person to eat an oyster was not so much bold as hungry, and willing to try anything for the sake of filling their belly. Oysters were once so plentiful in British waters that they were eaten only by the poor, having little or no value. It is only with over-fishing and habitat destruction that they have become rare enough to entice the rich. One mistake people make when they first try oysters is they imagine they must be served raw. We all know this is the popular way to serve them, but there are many delicious recipes fo...

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...

Summer brings a special character to my dinners. The table erupts with colour as I add edible flowers and specialist herbs like bronze fennel or red oxalis as garnishes. I have a loose-weave tablecloth that shows the colour of green, pink or blue undercloths beneath. Table flowers are chosen for their scent as well as their colour, and freesias are a favourite. With so much colour on the dining table, I love to serve colourful and frivolous aperitif drinks, too. One such is the Douglas Fairbanks cocktail. As befits a handsome and daring actor, the cocktail is strong, sharp and fruity. Douglas Fairbanks 60ml dry gin 20ml apricot brandy 10ml fresh lime juice 15ml egg white Place all the ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake hard until your hand can't stand the cold. Double-strain into a coupe glass and garnish with slices of lime and cocktail cherries. Pimms & lemonade has become synonymous with the English summer, garnished with heaps of fruit, cucumber...

I love sherry. It makes a beautiful and sophisticated start to any evening. There’s a bar in Madrid that serves nothing else, and when we visited we had an amazing night. Maybe it’s something in the Andalusian soul that seeps into the grapes, something to do with careful aging in quiet bodegas or just that my sherry glasses are so lovely, but sherry seems to have an air of calm and quiet about it. Whether I’m drinking manzanilla or fino under the July sun or sipping an oloroso or amontillado by the fireside at our friend Chris's flat in November, I find there’s something inherently mindful about the experience. Image: S Fogarty I never serve sweet sherry as an aperitif. I may be influenced by remembering something awful in a schooner with a cherry across the top in a Merseyside restaurant, circa 1986. More likely, it’s simply that the best sweet sherry, Pedro Ximinès, is simply too sweet to really benefit the appetite and sits much better as an accompaniment t...