HEY, TEXAS: Peru Wants You. It wants you to love pisco the way it loves pisco. It wants pisco to roll off your tongue as readily as whiskey or tequila, to be pressed into duty among your home bar's loyal soldiers, to pepper the ranks of cocktail lists from Dallas to San Antonio. It wants thoughts of pisco to hover at happy hour like unmarked helicopters in your head.
We're a long way from that now. But the South American brandy is on the rise in the U.S., with American imports of Peruvian pisco more than doubling from 2010 to 2014. That's enough to inspire Peru's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism to mount an all-out campaign to promote pisco in the States, with Texas its number-one target.
"It's, like, its own country," says Erick Aponte, trade commissioner of the ministry's Miami office. "It's a combination of sophisticated, chic markets. We're hoping to take advantage of the enormous potential Texas has as a market for Peru's pisco."
In fact, until Aponte counseled otherwise, officials had initially considered making Chicago the third stop on a recent pisco promotion tour that included New York City and New Orleans. "I was, like, 'No - let's go to North Texas,' " Aponte says.
That's what brought a small delegation to Dallas' Midnight Rambler early last month for a reception celebrating the Texas debut of two Peruvian piscos, La Diablada and Macchu Pisco. "I like to think of pisco as the other aromatic white spirit," says Rambler co-owner Chad Solomon - gin being the other.
Pisco, a clear brandy with 16th-century roots, is made from freshly pressed stemless grapes, a cousin of Cognac and Armagnac. (The Peruvian distinction matters because pisco is made in both Peru and Chile, both of whom claim to have invented it and have more or less agreed to disagree. Or at least to not be in the same room together.)
Pisco's popularity is up even in Peru, part of a growing embrace of gastronomy and consumption of healthy, quality ingredients - the same type of foodie movement that inspired America's cocktail renaissance. "People are understanding that pisco is part of that," says BarSol Pisco founder Diego Loret De Mola.
But while pisco is making big strides, the 1.7 million cases sold in the U.S. last year are still a trickle among the $23 billion flood of spirits sold nationwide. "It's not even to the stage where mezcal was a few years ago," says John Garrett of Irving-based distributor Victory. "Pisco is a long row to hoe."
Peru has some work to do, then - a state full of bartenders and consumers to rev up and educate. For that it will need a point man, a firebrand, someone to plant the seeds of inspiration. Someone to champion the cause.
Someone like Johnny Schuler.
The hardest working man in pisco business
YOU THINK YOU can keep up with this man? Forget about it. You can't keep up with this man. "I love to drink," says Johnny Schuler, the sonorous, ebullient master distiller of Pisco Porton, Peru's largest exporter of pisco to the U.S. "And I do it with regularity."
He has to. As the nation's unofficial pisco ambassador, the larger-than-life TV host is constantly on the campaign trail. This week, on a trip that coincided with Peruvian Independence Day, he came to Texas and beat a 10-hour, Pisco Porton-laden path through central Dallas that tested the gaudy dress socks he's fond of wearing.
As a young man in Peru he worked for his father, unimpressed with the cheap pisco served in his dad's restaurant. But one day, a friend introduced him to the goods made by local artisan producers, and he couldn't believe his taste buds. This wasn't pisco. This couldn't be pisco. It tasted too good.
Since that night, he says, he's never drunk anything but pisco and has spent his life promoting the spirit. In 2010 he launched Pisco Porton with the help of a Houston-based backer, the two devising Porton's muscular signature bottle one night over Negronis and Whiskey Sours.
On Tuesday, his five-stop Dallas tour kicked off with a two-hour pisco workshop at Midnight Rambler before an increasingly lively rented coach hauled attendees toward pisco receptions at The Mansion at Turtle Creek and then Stephan Pyles downtown, followed by a pisco-paired Peruvian dinner at Victor Tango's in Knox-Henderson. A late-night pisco happy hour capped things off at The Dram, across the street.
The idea was to promote the spirit's versatility by showcasing its use in cocktails and ability to be paired with food. At the opening workshop, attendees got a taste of Pisco Porton's pepper-raisin flagship expression and banana-peel-scented Caravedo, one of the distillery's newest releases.
They learned that there are three types of pisco, made from eight possible grape varieties, a palette that opens realms of flavor possibility. Schuler's presentation also extolled pisco's lightly nuanced character and the stricter rules that Peruvian producers play by since pisco was declared a national heritage in 1991 - forbidden, for example, to use oak to add character or water to lower the proof, methods used by many other spirit producers.
Pisco is made in five coastal Peruvian states whose environmental conditions, nestled against the towering Andes mountain range and set off from the Amazon jungles, benefit from a greenhouse effect creating overpoweringly sweet grapes. "But that is what gives us the alcohol," Schuler says. Like his own distillery, whose modern design evokes the centuries-old hacienda operation it succeeds and lets gravity drive the distillation process, it's nature at work.
"This is the miracle that makes pisco happen," he says.
In Peru, pisco is kind of a big deal. The country has a National Pisco Day, and a National Pisco Sour Day; in 2007, the government awarded Schuler its Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts to promote the spirit. He's a master storyteller, and his passion for his product is evident, with pronouncements occasionally pouring from his lips in Vicente Fernandez-like growls. The results show in his much-decorated portfolio; Caravedo, a 100-percent quebranta grape product that goes down velvety smooth with lingering chocolate notes, recently won an unprecedented four gold medals in Peruvian pisco competition.
"My pride - I'm sorry, it overflows," he says. "But I will make the best pisco in the world."
Meaning, he thinks the best is still to come.
Reinventing the Pisco Punch
THE PISCO PUNCH came to life in San Francisco, of all places, during the go-for-broke days of the Gold Rush. As author Guillermo Toro-Liro notes, pisco was easier to get than whiskey, which had to be brought in by wagon from the Eastern U.S; pisco arrived on South American cargo ships that regularly posted up in the Bay.
No one knows for sure exactly what comprised Duncan Nicol's recipe that rose to popularity at San Francisco's Bank Exchange Saloon, but today it's evolved as a tropical blend of pisco, pineapple, citrus and sweetener. A supposed secret ingredient, which may or may not have been cocaine, has been lost to the ages - but for that reason, it's an openly malleable cocktail.
That made it the perfect drink du jour at last month's pisco tasting room at New Orleans' Tales of the Cocktail festival, the spirits industry's largest annual gathering. Sponsored by the Peruvian trade office, the packed event featured seven Peruvian piscos and differing spins on the drink applied by American mixmasters who've climbed aboard the pisco train.
For example, a supremely refreshing version from Tony Abou-Ganim (aka "The Modern Mixologist") featured Macchu Pisco, floral Yellow Chartreuse and a pineapple-ginger foam garnish. Meanwhile, bar man Jim Kearns, of New York's Happiest Hour and Slowly Shirley, expertly paired Pisco Porton with aji amarillo (a Peruvian chili), passion fruit syrup and a guava puree.
The commission went all-out to evoke Peruvian flavor in the party surroundings, with artifacts, Peruvian cookies ordered from a baker in Miami and replicated artworks from the Cuzco School of Art. Attendees lined up to take photos in Peruvian garb.
Ultimately, whether Peru's efforts will bear fruit depend on continued interest in craft cocktails and, obviously, building an American taste for the product. But when it comes to cocktails, Victory's Garrett thinks the simpler, the better.
"Not everybody wants to deal with egg whites and all that," he says. "What about a pisco and tonic? Let's dumb it down."
For Schuler and his proud compatriots, it's not just a matter of business. It's a matter of pride.
"We can make Peru be known through a glass of pisco," says BarSol's Loret. "I don't sell pisco; I sell Peru."
