To assist my anticipatory salivation ahead of Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown’s Tales of the Cocktail presentation on “The Cafes of Paris”, I have been taking a look at a few lesser known French aperitifs. Several weeks ago I took a look at Pineau des Charentes. Today I focus on a pair of fruit quinquinas.

Quinquina is vermouth’s neglected cousin. Vermouth is well recognized, if widely feared and misunderstood. Martini drinkers fall into two camps: those who really want vermouth in their drink, and those who merely wish to ritualistically conjure up its spirit. However, while vermouth provokes fierce debate and elaborate juju, the mention of quinquina elicits little more than a blank stare. This is a shame because quinquina is an interesting category. To fix those blank stares, perhaps a little explanation is in order.

Both quinquina and vermouth are aromatized wines (i.e. wines flavored with herbs and spices). Quinquinas distinguish themselves from vermouths in using quinine as a key flavoring. As in tonic water, the quinine originally served a medicinal purpose – warding off malaria and all that. Vermouth and quinquina are not mutually exclusive categories. Some vermouth producers sell ‘quinquina’ versions alongside their regular vermouths: for example Martini & Rossi release their sweet vermouth in both ‘quinquina’ and standard versions. However, despite some overlap there are marked differences, with quinquinas tending to emphasize spice while vermouths are more herbal.

Similar to vermouths, which can be broadly classified into sweet and dry styles, quinquinas largely fall into rouge and blanc styles. The rouge style is rich, spicy and based on red wine – Dubonnet Rouge is the classic example. The blanc style is light, citrus accented, and based on white wine – Lillet Blanc is the iconic product.

For some reason neither of these mainstream styles of quinquina ever challenged vermouth to become a ubiquitous cocktail ingredient. Cocktail recipes never casually call for a generic rouge or blanc quinquina. Quinquina is called for only occasionally, and always by brand. Even luminaries like Charles H. Baker considered Dubonnet to be “only needed in the more elaborate establishments”, and I do not recall him mentioning Lillet at all. Considering that Baker saw orgeat, kummel and six types of bitters as more or less essential bar supplies, this adds up to a bit of a slap in the face for the quinquina category.

If mainstream quinquinas like Dubonnet and Lillet are fairly obscure, fruit flavored quinquina are even more so. These fruity quinquina do not fall within either the rouge or blanc styles, with heavy fruit macerations completely masking the base wine. They deserve a look from cocktailians though, offering a great source of fruit flavors and complexity, yet one with minimal sweetness. Two products are introduced below: RinQuinQuin and Orange Colombo.

RinQuinQuin (15% alcohol by volume) is a peach flavored quinquina. It is produced in Provence by the same firm that makes Henri Bardouin pastis. The name means something like an invigorating drink or a pick-me-up in French. The production process involves maceration, distillation, blending and several months of aging. Both distilled alcohol and wine are infused with quinine, other herbs and spices, and peaches. The peaches are what distinguish the product, and are added not as fruit, but rather as leaves, skins and kernels. This makes for a very complex flavor. The product is lightly sweetened. The result is a fruity but refreshingly dry aperitif wine with a distinctly bitter edge.

Orange Colombo (15% alcohol by volume) is an orange flavored quinquina along the same lines as RinQuinQuin. Based on its complex taste I am guessing it is flavored with more than just orange skins. As in RinQuinQuin, leaves, blossoms or other material may also be used.

These fruit quinquina are traditionally consumed either chilled or over ice, perhaps garnished with a twist of lemon. However, there is no reason they cannot be used in cocktails. Bear in mind that their mild fruitiness makes them poor vermouth substitutes, while their lack of sugar and their herbal complexity prevent them from standing in for fruit liqueurs. A bit of a fresh approach is in order.

Here are a few ideas. . .

Peach Martinez

1 oz Genever (Bols Oude)

1 oz Italian vermouth (Martini Rossi)

1 oz RinQuinQuin

2 dashes Fees Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters

1 tsp maraschino

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

A nice take on the Martinez. Cutting the vermouth with RinQuinQuin makes for a lighter and more interesting drink. The Genever provides a mellow but solid base, neither fading into obscurity nor dominating. The complex peach notes mingle nicely with the cherry. Increase the Genever a little if you find it lacks kick.

When playing around with RinQuinQuin to create variations on existing recipes you will probably find that cutting vermouth half-and-half with RinQuinQuin works better than a straight substitution. RinQuinQuin is more of a one note product than vermouth, albeit a complex note.

RinQuinQuin Vesper

3 oz gin (Tanqueray)

1 oz vodka (Stolichnaya)

¼ oz Lillet Blanc

¼ oz RinQuinQuin

Shake over ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with a large lemon twist.

This is just brilliant. By upping the bitterness the RinQuinQuin addresses the problem of Lillet having been reformulated and lightened since the Vesper was originally invented. The RinQuinQuin also adds a peach layer to the citrus in the Lillet.

Orange Colombo can be used to create another nice Vesper variation. Both products can also be used in regular Martinis, where they work especially well with delicate gins like Tanqueray 10 that stand up poorly to vermouth. I would be inclined to split the quinquina 50/50 with vermouth.

Orange Colombo Pisco Sour

2 oz pisco

½ oz Orange Columbo (or cut back to 1/4 oz)

¾ oz lime juice

1/3 oz simple syrup

1 egg white (half an egg white per drink is sufficient if making multiple drinks)

Dash or two of Fees Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters

Put everything except the bitters in a mixing glass. Shake long and hard over ice until the drink becomes foamy. Double strain into a sour glass. Finish the drink by garnishing the foam with a few drops of bitters – you can use a toothpick to draw a pattern on the foam. A sour glass, champagne flute or wine glass is preferable for this drink. The garnish of bitters on egg-white foam is intended to provide aroma. A sour glass concentrates the aromas, while the smaller surface area means that the foam, and the aromas, last longer.

The Orange Columbo adds both a subtle orange note and a light bite, making a pleasant variation that jazzes up the original. Perhaps I am not using the right pisco, but I find pisco sours tend to be a little too plain and smooth. Orange Columbo livens things up without creating an unseemly ruckus. You can also try a splash of Orange Colombo in a Margarita – obviously you will still need the orange liqueur, but possibly it could be scaled back a notch.

There is tons of potential for using these obscure fruit quinquina in cocktails. If you see a bottle you should grab it and have a play around. Currently these products are underutilized, leaving the field wide open to experimentation.

The Avenue

1 oz passion fruit juice*

1 oz calvados

1 oz bourbon

1 dash orange flower water (about ¼ tsp of a fairly mild Middle Eastern one – but could have added a lot less)

1 dash grenadine (about 1/4 tsp but could have added more)

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass

‘Perfumey’ seems the best word to describe this delightful drink. There are amazing smells from the passion fruit and the orange flower water. I find the bourbon and calvados blend into an interesting base, with the bourbon giving some simple sweetness in the background and the calvados a spirituous fruitiness that provides a nice foundation for the passion fruit. The taste is still fairly challenging though. It smells like heaven, but the taste gives you a jolt – a pleasant one of course.

Freshly squeezed passion fruit juice, while full of amazing flavors and scents, is slightly astringent. Therefore you can afford to be generous with the grenadine. The grenadine will also give a little body to counteract the slightly thin and grainy quality of the passion fruit juice. Be careful not to add so much that you lose the passion fruit color though!

The Jinx

1 oz passion fruit juice (recipe specifically said sweetened so I added a dash of Monin passion fruit syrup to the juice)

1 oz gin

1 oz calvados

1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass

This drink resembles The Avenue above, with the substitution of gin for the bourbon and bitters for the orange flower water. The gin is a tasty swap. It is not necessarily better, but it is definitely good. I am not sure on the bitters though. I wonder if orange bitters would work better, or even peach. Angostura seems to distract a little from the delicate passion fruit. But maybe I just added too much.

Comparing different drinks made with common products is a very interesting exercise. My first impression of this drink was that some of the taste that I had mistaken for orange flower water in the previous drink was actually the passion fruit. Passion fruit really is that aromatic. No wonder the Chinese word for passion fruit literally means “hundred fragrance fruit” (???).

I think I may prefer this drink to the above. It may be less aromatic, but it seems a touch more robust.

The Melody

1 ½ oz gin

¾ oz passion fruit juice

¾ oz Lillet

1 tsp Cointreau

1 tsp calvados

Here the calvados becomes a mere accent and the Lillet softens the drink up and helps everything blend together. The passion fruit juice might need a touch of sweetening, but this is a smooth drink, smooth to a fault if anything. The passion fruit takes center stage, with the other flavors just providing little touches of color.

The above three drinks were all decent. The Melody was nice but perhaps a touch one dimensional. I rather liked the Jinx.

The last drink I tried was a bit of an oddball and I am including it more for the sake of completeness than as a recommendation.

Sardi’s Delight

1 ½ oz gin

¼ oz lemon juice

¼ oz passion fruit juice (in fact I just added about a ½ oz of pulp)

¼ oz grenadine

¼ oz pastis

1 dash Angostura Bitters

Shake over ice and double strain into a cocktail glass.

Like a lot of drinks with a decent dose of pastis this tasted of. . . pastis. There was something interesting in the passion fruit and pastis combination, but for the sake of balance the pastis needed to be toned way down. I think passion fruit and pastis would be better companions in a Tiki drink style concoction that contains a decent slug of passion fruit juice and a dash or two of pastis. Maybe something like a Monkey Gland, made with passion fruit instead of or as well as orange could also be interesting?

* I extracted juice from the fruit by cutting them open, then putting the pulp in a tea strainer resting over a container and pressing with a muddler. You will need to give the juice a few minutes to drip through the strainer, and it is difficult to get a good extraction (the pulp tends to slide away from the muddler rather than give up its juice), but each fruit should comfortably yield up to 1/2 oz of juice. With a better method of extracting the juice you could probably get a little more.

Incognito

6 parts Lillet

3 parts Cognac

1 part apricot brandy

1 dash Peychauld’s Bitters

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This is excellent! It is a nice smooth drink that should show off a good apricot brandy very well. It is also a nice drink for showing off Lillet. As a fruity and summery aperitif wine Lillet makes a great partner to a flavor like apricot. Lillet being slightly bitter means you have to pick the apricot flavor out in this drink, but not every apricot brandy drink should taste assertively of apricots. The Cognac adds some backbone and richness, and the Peychaud’s Bitters give complexity without the heavy spicy notes of something like Angostura. Not being an especially strong drink it is also suitable for the oversized cocktail glasses that are favored these days. My only reservation is that since the formula of Lillet changed in the 1980s to become less bitter, this drink must taste a little different to how it was intended.

Culross Cocktail

1 ½ oz gold rum (I used Cruzan Estate)

½ oz Lillet

¼ oz lime juice

¼ oz apricot brandy

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This drink has tons of potential. It was a tad light bodied and watery, but I colder ice and a different rum might improve that. Maybe the proportions should also be reworked a little. There are several versions of this drink. This drink deserves to be looked at further.

Peck

1 ½ oz gin

½ oz dry vermouth

½ oz apricot brandy

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This is a simple but very tasty drink. There is a similar drink that uses Crème de Cassis in place of the apricot brandy. I think it is called a Parisien or something similar. Anyway, this one uses the same principle but with a different liqueur.

Maidens Prayer Variation

¾ oz gin

¾ oz Lillet

½ oz calvados

½ oz apricot brandy

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

The addition of calvados makes this one very interesting. However, as it stands I think it comes across as a little confused. Some tweaking around with the proportions might really improve it. It could deserve a second look some time.

Mayfair Cocktail

1 1/2 oz gin

1/2 oz orange juice

1/2 oz apricot brandy

1 dash of pimento dram

optional pinch of cloves (I didn’t bother – but in retrospect I should probably have added a dash of Angostura Bitters since that has a clove taste)

Shake with ice and strain into a glass.

I was excited about this one. It isn’t often I get a chance to break out my homemade pimento dram. Sadly it didn’t do much for me. The apricot brandy and orange juice combination is just not exciting. This might work better with a tarter citrus juice.

Charlie Lindbergh

1 ¼ oz gin

1 oz Lillet

¼ oz apricot brandy

1 dash orange bitters

Stir over ice and strain into a glass.

Tasty but average.

Prohibition

1 oz gin

1 oz Lillet

¼ oz orange juice

¼ oz apricot brandy

Shake over ice, garnish with a lemon twist, and strain into a cocktail glass.

Given the excellent name and the list of ingredients I had been expecting to enjoy this one. Unfortunately it was a bit of a let down. It looks good on paper but somehow the orange juice-apricot-Lillet combination does not work very well. Orange juice with Lillet tastes slightly insipid.

Barbara East Cocktail

1 oz bourbon

¾ oz grapefruit juice

½ oz apricot brandy

¼ tsp sugar (I left this out)

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This was pleasant enough but not especially exciting.

Shrapnel

1 ¼ oz bourbon

½ oz sweet vermouth

½ oz dry vermouth

¼ oz apricot brandy

Stir over ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with an orange slice.

This is really just an apricot accented Manhattan. Neither unpleasant nor very exciting.

This is my first time participating in Raiders of the Lost Cocktail, hosted this month at Cocktail Chronicles. Resurrecting undeservedly forgotten things appeals to me, so Raiders of the Lost Cocktail seems like a great idea. Unfortunately I do not have much of a library of old cocktail books to scour for recipes. My only older book would be the Savoy Cocktail Book. Does Ted Haigh’s Cocktail Database website count as a source for the purposes of this event?

Anyway, the theme for this month’s Raiders of the Lost Cocktail is apricot Brandy. I have taken my research extremely seriously and my bottle of Marie Brizzard Apry has the scars to prove it. It feels like I must have tried a dozen or so apricot brandy cocktails, mostly from www.cocktaildb.com. In the end the drink I settled on for my entry turned out to also be in the Savoy.

The theme for this month really interested me since apricot brandy is so common in older cocktail recipes. I remember being very excited the first time I got hold of some decent apricot brandy because I figured I’d be able to make all these amazing old recipes. Looking back though, none of the drinks I made with that bottle of apricot brandy were especially memorable. In fact, off the top of my head I can hardly think of a single apricot brandy drink other than the Charlie Chaplin (for more on the Charlie Chaplin, and it’s dubious cousin the Buster Keaton, see here). This situation seems odd. Apricot brandy is great stuff and used to be widespread in cocktails, but it doesn’t seem to have many really popular drinks associated with it. Of course perhaps I am just ignorant on this one.

To narrow the field down a little I decided to look for a drink that combined apricot brandy and Lillet. Just before Christmas I got hold of a bottle of Lillet for the first time and I figured the two would be a good match. I was also sure I would find plenty of older recipes using the combination, since both used to be popular cocktail ingredients. I was sure at least one of these older recipes would be worth resurrecting.

Many drinks later, and after a detour away from Lillet, I finally settled on the Self Starter, an excellent drink that is perhaps just a little like the Corpse Reviver. Recipe below.

Self Starter

1 ½ oz gin (I used Plymouth)

¾ oz Lillet Blanc

¼ oz Apricot Brandy (I used Marie Brizard Apry)

2 dashes pastis (I used about ¼ teaspoon of Henri Bardoin but some people might prefer less)

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This is an excellent summery drink. First you get a whiff of apricots and aniseed, then the dry citrus and aromatic flavors from the gin and Lillet, and finally some apricot sweetness to round things off. The apricot brandy and Lillet almost mesh together into a single fruity taste. As always the pastis adds a touch of complexity, complementing the apricot particularly nicely. Overall the drink does a nice balancing act between dry complexity and more luscious summer flavors.

I got hold of some Lillet the other day. I really like Dubonnet so had been looking forward to trying Lillet. Dubonnet and Lillet both belong to the ‘quinqina’ category of flavored wines, namely quinine flavored wine-based aperitifs. Dubonnet is red while Lillet is white, though Dubonnet also produces a less well known white version and Lillet also has a red version. The situation is a little like that with vermouth, where vermouth producers typically offer both sweet and dry versions.

Tasting Lillet on its own I found it sweeter than I had expected, and not that different to a fruity white wine. I had been hoping for something a little more assertive. I think Dubonnet remains my favorite of the two. Dubonnet has a medicinal bitterness that is only faintly present in Lillet. Incidentally, while some people describe ‘quinquina’ as similar to vermouth, I don’t think this description is very helpful. To my mind Dubonnet and Lillet are far more gentle than vermouth, meaning those who fear vermouth could consider quinquina. To me, vermouth seems so heavily flavored that the base wine becomes hardly noticeable, while Dubonnet and Lillet place the wine in the foreground with the flavorings as an accent.  The flavorings tend to be spicy rather than herbal. Dubonnet makes me think of spiced port, while Lillet resembles a desert wine with a touch of bitter complexity.

The formula of Lillet was changed significantly in the 1980s. Compared to the original the new version is said to be fruitier and less bitter (less quinine?). The Lillet website describes the new version as less ‘syrupy’, so possibly it also has a lower sugar content. The modern Lillet is still pretty sweet though. Perhaps when they say ‘syrupy’ they have something like cough syrup in mind? In that case they could really be saying the new version is less bitter. Anyway, compared to other aromatized aperitif wines (i.e. vermouths or Dubonnet) Lillet comes across as sweet and fruity rather than aromatic or herbal. It could almost pass for a desert wine. The bitterness and aromatics in Lillet sit in the background. Personally I reckon they should think about reworking the recipe again to restore the lost oomph.

Incidentally the formula for Dubonnet also appears to have changed recently. They redesigned the bottle to give it a more modern look and simultaneously shaved a percentage point or so off the alcohol content. I did a comparison between the remains of an old bottle and a freshly opened new one. I have to be honest and say I couldn’t taste any real difference, but it would still be nice if they had left it unchanged. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? However much you rework it, Dubonnet is never going to become Diet Coke – at least I hope not.

There are dozens of Lillet cocktails I want to try, but the obvious first thing was to do like James Bond and make a Vesper! So I did the following. . .

3 oz gin (Bond drank Gordons but I used Tanqueray since the only Gordons in New Zealand is nasty, low-proof stuff)

1 oz vodka (Stolichnaya, what else?)

½ oz Lillet Blanc

Shake over ice and garnish with a lemon twist.

I believe this marks the first appearance of vodka on this blog. I had to go out and buy the vodka specially, so rarely do I have a reason to use the stuff. Stolichnaya is a little sweet, particularly given the already sweetish Lillet. In its defense though it is cheap, genuinely Russian, not distilled from Icelandic glacier water before being filtered through a Javanese volcano or some other bullshit, and has one of the coolest label designs out there. Whatever you may say about the contents of the bottle, the Stolichnaya label is classic communist art. Moscovskaya would have been my first choice if available given that it is a little drier. I guess Bond would have drunk Smirnoff. Still, lets not get too hung up on the finer points of a flavorless spirit.

The vesper is an extremely easy to drink yet high octane martini variation. The alcohol is not exactly disguised, but you don’t sense that you are drinking lots of alcohol in quite the same way that you do with a standard martini. Somebody used to low alcohol drinks will probably taste lots of alcohol when drinking this and exercise caution, but somebody used to the traditional gin and vermouth martini could end up putting these away rather fast. The fruitiness in the Lillet makes the drink eminently shippable and the vodka lightens the gin and gives an impression of the drink being less potent than it really is.

I probably wouldn’t drink these too often but they are a nice thing to have in the rotation.