Drink

Try making up your own cocktail. It's hard. Really hard. Cocktails are balanced chemical concoctions, delicious flavors and fun textures that result from a trick of various dancing ingredients, and usually, when you come up with a cocktail idea and try to make it — even if you’ve read great theory books — it is either too sweet or too nothing, too flat. The best way to come up with one, then, is to play on existing templates. It’s not difficult to make your own sour or spritz, but the best of the best, perhaps the most fun cocktail ever, is the espresso martini. And no cocktail is easier to play with. Many of today’s classic cocktails trace their heritage to the Prohibition Era, but the espresso martini comes from the swinging nightlife of 1980s London.

There are good wine shops and bad wine shops. Among their various attributes, the good ones have a broad selection of interesting wines from interesting places and — important add-on — a knowledgeable staff whose members can talk intelligently about their wares and can steer you in the right direction. The bad ones — well, you know. Their shelves are full of the stuff the distributors tell them to buy and their staff is not really sure whether Morgon is the name of the boss’s pet or a place in Beaujolais that produces good wine. My office in New York is close to an excellent wine shop called Flatiron Wine & Spirits. It is a big shop on Broadway at 18th Street and it boasts a large, expert and helpful staff.

Near the lake in the quaint beach town of New Buffalo, a rotating sign carries the silhouette of a shaggy mutt. A line forms near the door for the boring beachy fare, churned out at factory pace. The souvenir hoodies are out the door as fast as they can print them; the Stray Dog has become a destination in itself. I’ve seen their signature motto — Sit! Stay! — everywhere from Santa Barbara to Brooklyn. You probably have too. And don’t get me wrong, the Stray Dog is great at being what it is: the quintessential beach-town bar. But I prefer it here, half a mile south, in the uncelebrated version of a beach-town bar. There’s no merch store, no zany southwest eggrolls, no Jägermeister dispenser, no television. Just ten velvety bar stools and endless respite.

Most readers will come to this column in February. “That’s the dead of winter,” you say (if you are in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). But I write at the absolute nadir of daylight. For some years now, I have kept a daylight diary. I generally start in mid-October and go through the return of daylight-saving time in March. It takes that long to convince me that summer really is on its way back. When I started, I simply noted the time the sun rose, when it set and how much daylight we had that day. I eventually got a little more elaborate, noting the phases of the moon and such, and making very brief annotations about significant events. Every year (so far), it’s been a story with a happy ending.

Does America have a national drink? It once did — not officially, quite, but in fact. And what was that national potation? Madeira. The wine, John Hailman writes in Thomas Jefferson on Wine, “symbolized to Americans a common patriotism and spirit of independence.” It was, he continues, the “mother’s milk of the American Revolution,” the “virtual national beverage after the Revolution.” Madeira was used to toast the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson dispensed it at his inauguration. Washington, Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin all loved the stuff. John Adams remarked that a few glasses of Madeira made anyone feel capable of being president.

While Republicans make a symbolic point of permitting smoking in the Capitol complex whenever they’re in power, no one’s lungs really seem to have been in it since John Boehner held the speakership. Back rooms in Washington aren’t what they used to be. So it’s nice that the oddly named Morton’s The Steakhouse — which as a Chicago-based chain is now really Morton’s The 65 Domestic and International Steakhouses — is one place where Washington’s journalists and politicians can still enjoy the complex aromas of cigars, steak and corruption. One person whom it’s almost unavoidable to see at Morton’s is the recently deposed chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, SenatorBob Menendez.

Early on in his classic Notes on a Cellar Book, the literary scholar George Saintsbury writes that “no reasonable person should quarrel if we begin with Sherry, even as the truly good and wise usually do at dinner.” That was in 1920. Can you imagine anyone writing that today? The answer is no. But that only tells us how fickle are the revolving fashions of taste. For us, Sherry is an antique taste, quaint if not fusty. By and large it’s something that maiden aunts drink between knitting projects and jumble sales. At its best, Sherry has a fading academic aroma. When I was in graduate school, I had a semester-long tutorial on Plato with the eminent Platonist Robert Brumbaugh.

From the beginning, Champagne has never been just a drink, or a region: it’s a celebration, an occasion, a trophy, a reward; a symbol of joyful decadence and glamorous debauchery; the overflowing drink of the American Dream. In short, it’s a boozy cheat sheet for the zeitgeist and the anxieties and dreams of the people who sip it. And, for the past seventy-five years or so, that zeitgeist has been driven by the United States. “American culture pervades everything,” says Christian Holthausen, a dual French-American citizen and founder of the Paris-based Champagne consulting firm Westbrook Marketing Partners. “Driving through Paris just now, I saw a Coca-Cola machine on one street, and a billboard for Apple on the next.

It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.