The place? The 2008 Indy Spirits Expo at Astor Wines & Spirits. The deal? Near-limitless alcohol samples and cocktails for a flat fee of $15. The general trend? Organics. But it was mostly all good.
I drank the Dominican rum only because the distributor lunged at me with a bottle of it and I pitied him; few gathered for his pirate refreshment. But I sort of have a kinship with the D.R., livin’ in Inwood and all.
The rep for a cachaça showed me where the sugarcane for it was grown, shaping the bar towel on her tabletop into an approximation of Brazil and pointing to the vicinity of the Amazon. I nodded and humored her and thought I’d tell her I’d been to that towel before and that the monkeys she was referring to are called micos but I only wanted her for her caipirinha. And I got it, eventually.
The genial entrepreneur of the woodily delectable Hudson Manhattan Rye Whiskey noted offhand that he began merely by owning a mill. His business partner wanted to produce bread in it. But the former convinced the latter otherwise: why not whiskey? Same ingredients, different technique. Good call.
St. Germain, the print campaign for which impresses me, tasted decent until I learned what I’d drank was a lemony cocktail and the stuff straight is sweet and syrupy, which is why I hated the lemongrass liqueur from the exhibitor just to the left, although it sounded tempting on paper.
We drank a lot. Allison favored the cubes of peppery cheese from the “eat something before you get too drunk” nook overlooking East Fourth Street. Jovito managed somehow to ingratiate himself with Colin, a vodka supplier, and in the next moment was standing next to the guy, shaking cocktails before an appreciative crowd. We toasted Jovito’s mixology, drank it, then drank some more.
One of the two scruffy guys peddling vodka infused with huckleberries (“It’s the state fruit of Idaho”) wore a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars T-shirt but admitted upon questioning that it was not necessarily his favorite Bowie album. “I’m more of a Bowie song guy than a Bowie album guy,” he said, nominating “Bring Me the Disco King.”
Guessing that the young lady at the pisco table wouldn’t have much to say about that brandy (“Pisco is a clear spirit distilled from grapes”), I asked her where one gets the best cocktails in the five boroughs. She warmed to the question, putting in top bids for PDT (which is accessed through a secret door in a phone booth in a hot-dog restaurant; no, really) and the bar at Le Lupanar, at Essex and Delancey. At one of them, she alleged, mentioning her name grants deluxe treatment. I forget which, but tell them Pisco Michelle sent you.
In the men’s room, as I completed a crucial step of the water cycle, a tipsy gent at the Mitsubishi Jet Towel admired the speed at which it dried his hands. With his digits hovering limply in space less than two feet from my urinal, he added, “This is the closest my hands have ever been to another guy’s dick.” And I believed him.