Travel has always been a part of the cocktail’s DNA. Early cocktail recipes called for American whiskey, British gin (itself a Dutch invention), Caribbean rum, French brandy, Italian vermouth, Spanish sherry and Portuguese madeira, among others. As travel and commerce have made the world smaller and better connected, the world of cocktails and mixed drinks has only become more diverse – and if you’ll excuse the pun – more cosmopolitan.
The new book Around the World in 80 Cocktails traces the cocktail’s journey around the globe, from the early 19th century through the 21st. Each of the cocktails collected in the book is linked to a place – sometimes literally and sometimes more metaphorically.
Falling Water
Wellington, New Zealand
Feijoa trees are a common sight in New Zealand backyards, and every year during its short season the nation feasts on the fresh fruit (as well as feijoa jam, feijoa pie, feijoa chutney, feijoa salsa …). The feijoa’s guava-like fruit tastes similar to a combination of pineapple and banana, with a faint hint of mint and a certain intoxicating je ne sais quoi. Alas, the feijoa will never really become a commercial crop, despite its seductive and unusual flavour, because the fruit bruises easily and turns to mush a few days after falling from the tree.
Despite being something of a New Zealand icon, the feijoa is in fact native to the Rio de la Plata region of South America. The plant became a popular ornamental tree across the world in the early 20th century, which is how it was introduced to New Zealand in 1908. Here it found ideal climate conditions for fruiting – and swiftly became part of the fabric of New Zealand life.
The feijoa’s cultural status in New Zealand might explain why, shortly after entrepreneur Geoff Ross started making 42 Below vodka from his garage in Wellington, the company started work on a feijoa-flavoured vodka. The taste is not for everyone; as 42 Below rather forlornly says on its website: “Like Van Gogh before it, this little beauty has yet to receive the recognition it deserves.”
The Falling Water highball is a simple mixture of 42 Below feijoa-flavoured vodka and Ch’i (a New Zealand–made, faintly herbaceous soft drink), garnished with a slice of cucumber. This cocktail came about when a (slightly tipsy) bartender from Wellington restaurant Matterhorn suggested this feijoa vodka could work well with Ch’i and cucumber because all three ingredients are green (Ch’i comes in a green bottle and the vodka bears a green label). The resulting highball possesses the same idiosyncratic allure as the fruit itself – and remains hugely popular at Matterhorn, which has become the world’s number one buyer of 42 Below Feijoa.
60ml 42 Below Feijoa vodka
120ml Ch’i
Cucumber slice, to garnish
Place vodka in a collins glass and add Ch’i. Top with ice. Garnish with a long, thin slice of cucumber.
Bartender’s tip: If you can’t find Ch’i, it can be replaced with sparkling clear lemonade or a lemon-lime-flavoured soft drink.
Fynbos
Cape Town, South Africa
Africa’s southern tip is home to the Cape Floristic Region, one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots. This region is dominated by abundant fynbos (literally fine bush), a generic term for small scrubby plants and bushes native to South Africa. The most well-known of these species is one that you may have consumed: aspalathus linearis, the plant from which rooibos tea is derived.
When Dutch colonists founded Cape Town in 1652, they discovered not only the Cape Floristic Region, but also wild “grapes” (technically rhoicissus tomentosa, a close relative), which indicated the land would be suitable for viticulture. By 1659, European vitis vinifera cuttings were flourishing in the Western Cape, and the first South African wine was successfully produced. French Huguenots, driven out of France in 1685, brought with them viticultural knowledge and winemaking experience, while slaves from Java, Madagascar and Mozambique tended and harvested the vines.
The racism that powered the nascent South African wine industry in the 17th century would be its undoing in the 20th century. International trade sanctions against South Africa, designed to break the apartheid system, coupled with overproduction thanks to high-yielding grape varieties planted in the wake of phylloxera meant that South Africa suffered from a glut of grapes and not much demand for wine. In response, the powerful industry body Kooperatieve Wijnbouwers Vereniging (KWV) directed large quantities of these excess grapes to be distilled into inexpensive brandy.
South Africa’s brandy industry was revived after apartheid and is now producing world-class stuff. This cocktail, adapted from the original invented by Johannesburg bartender Eugene Thompson, combines brandy with native rooibos tea to create a truly place-specific tipple.
60ml brandy (preferably South African)
30ml rooibos-honey syrup (see bartender’s tip)
15ml ginger liqueur
2 dashes orange bitters
Lemon peel, to garnish
Build ingredients in a mixing glass.
Add ice and stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.
Bartender’s tip: To make rooibos-honey syrup, mix two parts strong, freshly brewed rooibos tea with one part honey and stir until honey is dissolved. Decant into a sterilised bottle. Store in the refrigerator.
Hanky Panky
London, England
During the dry years of prohibition, the cocktail world’s centre of gravity – once so firmly ensconced in the United States – shifted towards wetter climes. Well-heeled Americans would make the short leap to Cuba, where they discovered the delights of the daiquiri and the mojito. Others found themselves further from home, in the cosmopolitan city of Paris, or searching for drinks and the meaning of life and death in Spain. But while these watering holes had their delights, it was to London that a great many of America’s most talented bartenders and their customers repaired. And when they arrived, they encountered Ada “Coley” Coleman – head bartender of the Savoy’s famous American Bar, and the first female celebrity bartender.
Under the tutelage of the wine merchant at Claridge’s hotel in London, Coleman had learned how to mix drinks – starting with the Manhattan circa 1899. From Claridge’s, she had moved to the newly renovated American Bar at the Savoy, and in a short amount of time became its head bartender. She worked at the Savoy for over 25 years, mixing drinks for the cream of Edwardian society, including the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Twain and the actor Charles Hawtrey.
According to Coleman, Hawtrey had a habit of dropping into the American Bar after long days of work and asking for “something with a bit of punch in it”. After some experimentation, Coleman presented Hawtrey with an original cocktail – a mixture of gin and sweet vermouth spiked with a few dashes of potent Fernet-Branca bitters. Hawtrey took a sip, then promptly drained the glass and shouted out, “By Jove! That is the real hanky-panky!”
45ml gin
45ml sweet red vermouth
5ml Fernet-Branca
Orange peel, to garnish
Build ingredients in a mixing glass. Add ice and stir to chill. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a twist of orange peel.
Japanese Slipper
Melbourne, Australia
Outside of Australia, the Japanese Slipper is regarded – if indeed it is known at all – as a curiosity: a small and perhaps regrettable footnote in the history of 1980s drinks. And while its popularity in its home country has definitely fallen, the Japanese Slipper still looms large in Australian drinkers’ imaginations – either as a reviled symbol of the excesses of the 1980s and 1990s, or as a nostalgic memory of a more innocent, pre-internet time when Australian mixology wasn’t quite so self-serious.
First concocted in 1984 by Jean-Paul Bourguignon at Mietta’s restaurant in the Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy, the Japanese Slipper would eventually pop up on cocktail lists the world over. Part of its appeal, no doubt, is the ease of remembering its recipe – it consists of three ingredients in equal parts. It also uses what was, in the early 1980s, a very trendy product: Midori, a neon-green, melon-flavoured liqueur produced by Japanese distiller Suntory. Midori had been launched at a star-studded party at New York City’s Studio 54 in 1978, the year after Saturday Night Fever had cemented disco’s dominance over American pop culture, and it survived the disco backlash to become a back-bar staple of the 1980s. The fact that Bourguignon was working at Mietta’s – in 1984 a rapidly ascending star of Melbourne’s fine-dining scene – meant his drink would have been seen and emulated by his peers.
The Japanese Slipper, with its heady rush of sugar and lurid colour, quickly became the go-to cocktail for the Australian casual drinker. It would retain that position until the middle of the 2000s, when it was deposed by the almighty espresso martini – the London-born cocktail invented by the late (and great) Dick Bradsell that eventually found its spiritual home in coffee-loving Melbourne.
30ml Midori
30ml Cointreau
30ml lemon juice
Maraschino cherry, to garnish
Build ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake thoroughly to chill. Double-strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.
Bartender’s tip: The Japanese Slipper’s balance relies on the use of Cointreau rather than a generic triple sec. Cointreau is drier and, at 40% alcohol by volume, significantly stronger than most other triple secs.
Mesha
Brisbane, Australia
When the craft cocktail movement started in earnest at the turn of the millennium, a new style of bar began to appear. These bars were more than simply watering holes where you could get a well-crafted drink – they were also ambassadors for a different approach to drink-making and hospitality, and their presence invariably altered the way the local hospitality scene operated. For Brisbane, that bar was the Bowery, and it was its original Mesha cocktail that made the Bowery a success story.
The Bowery opened in 2003, inspired by the American bars that owner Stephanie Canfell experienced in New York City: a heady mixture of dive bars, local bars and hotel bars such as the Waldorf Astoria and the Plaza. The resulting Brisbane bar was the kind of place you could go for an immaculately crafted classic cocktail, but also the kind of place that was packed to the gills on Friday and Saturday nights.
The Mesha was commissioned for the Bowery from London-based bartender Barry Chalmers, who moved to Australia for a change of schenery. Chalmers sent the recipe over before arriving in Brisbane, where he found the drink had become the star of the Bowery’s second cocktail list. It’s not hard to see why: with its Żubrówka vodka base it appealed to drinkers who had cut their teeth on the vodka craze of the late 1990s, while the pineapple juice and falernum syrup gave the drink a tropical tiki touch that fits perfectly with Brisbane’s humid subtropical climate. It also helped that the drink came out an alluring shade of pink (thanks to the raspberry puree) and with a cinnamon sugar rim.
Lime wedge, to rim the glass
Cinnamon sugar, to rim the glass
40ml Żubrówka vodka
20ml apple liqueur
20ml pineapple juice
15ml falernum
15ml lime juice
5ml raspberry puree (or 3–4 fresh raspberries, muddled)
Apple slices, to garnish
Prepare a coupe glass by moistening the outside of its rim with a lime wedge and dipping it in cinnamon sugar. Leave it to dry and then chill in the freezer.
Build ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake until chilled. Double-strain into the prepared coupe glass. Garnish with a fan of thin apple slices.
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This is an edited extract from Chad Parkhill’s Around the World in 80 Cocktails (Hardie Grant, $29.99)
