The Spirits #59: The Enzoni

~ Negroni Sour ~ $11,000 Grapes ~ Her Hippo ~ Calamity Again ~

~ THE ENZONI ~

Five white grapes
30ml gin
30ml Campari
20ml lemon juice
10ml golden sugar syrup

Put the grapes in the bottom of the shaker and muddle in order to extract the juice. Fill halfway with ice and shake until your fingers go numb. Now fine-strain into a large tumbler containing fresh ice - ideally one large cube. Garnish with grapes, maybe threaded onto a cocktail stick.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full recipe archive is here. 
➡️ You can subscribe and support my work here. 
📙And you can buy my book here.

…and if you like The Spirits, do please forward this to all of your friends. That way, when you visit them, they will feel obliged to make you delicious drinks.

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THE Enzoni was invented at New York’s Milk & Honey bar in 2003 by Vincenzo Errico. Since then, it has become (so I read on the internet) “the most popular drink on in the internet!” Impossible to verify. But it does good business on the platforms, for sure. The colour surely helps - no other cocktail looks quite like it. And it’s a useful half-step on from the Negroni. You might think of it as a Negroni Sour, only with actual grapes in place of the customary vermouth. Which is noteworthy - as grapes don’t usually feature in cocktails in unfermented form.

Perhaps that’s because eating grapes tend to be - as Bee Wilson has written - bland and uniform products of modern engineering. Wine grapes are near infinite in their variety. Supermarket grapes are bred to please modern palates: plump, seedless, thin-skinned, generically sweet. But grapes weren’t like this for much of their history. Even when *nostalgic music* I was a boy, pips were customary; and it’s the tannins in the pips that provide much of the depth of flavour amid all that froggy sweet jelly. I happen to have a rather out-of-control vine in my garden and the grapes from it, while rather difficult to eat (you have to sort of pulverise them on your tongue and spit out the skin and bones) produce the most delicious juice - like drinking the earth itself. The French take grapes seriously. And the Japanese take grapes really seriously. A bunch of Roman Red grapes once sold in Japan for $11,0000. I can remember mindlessly biting into a dusky mauve grape left in a Kyoto hotel room once and actually saying “Oh my God” out loud, on my own. It was, I think, the single most delicious thing I have ever eaten. Like taking a bite out of another dimension.

Anyway! If you happen to have a ¥1000 bunch of Roman Reds, go ahead, bung ‘em in. I happened to use quite low-grade greengrocer grapes in the above recipe, which clearly fell somewhere below the supermarket Candysweet standard. In the drink, however, their piney tartness proved just the thing. A slight hint of coriander seed? Or hang on, is it cedarwood? At any rate, it really brought out a sharp, resiny bitterness in the Campari, conjuring a Spring day on a Ligurian cliff top. Or something.

I also made another version of this drink, look:

~ THE FALL ENZONI ~

Five black grapes
30ml rye whiskey
30ml Campari
20ml lemon juice
10ml golden sugar syrup

Muddle; shake; strain over ice.

This is a popular Enzoni variation, created by Leandro DiMonriva, better known as the Educated Barfly (who is, in the parlance, killing it in the online mixological influencer world right now). It’s a bit like the Boulevardier version of the Enzoni: very delicious, but somehow a bit too delicous if such a thing were possible - much like a seedless grape, in fact. Untrustworthy. But I still like the idea of a cocktail coming in light and dark form, to take account of the seasons. Just now, it feels as if we’re at the blustery midpoint between Winter and Spring. Which way will the winds blow? Every which way, or so it seems.

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PLAYLIST

Many apologies; it has just not been possible to create a fresh playlist this week. Please enjoy Dry Cleaning’s album New Long Leg instead - I went to see them live the other day and was reminded how much I liked them. Alternatively last week’s list is still up… and there’s always the archive.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Sam Byers’s novel Come Join Our Disease. 💩😫

Calamity again by Anne Applebaum (Atlantic)

Taras Shevchenko (Asymptote)

The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine by Masha Gessen (New Yorker)

Ukrainian Voices (Vice)

Max Seddon from a few weeks back but still relevant, I think, on the surrealness of modern Moscow (FT)

And for work reasons I have been revisiting Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s classic interview w/ Tom Hiddleston (GQ).

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SHOPPING LIST

Grenadine, ginger beer, lemon/lime, maraschino cherries.

💋