This week’s drink is a complete mystery in terms of where it came from and whether anyone still actually drinks it. It’s not in The Savoy Cocktail Book, The Joy of Mixology, The Mr. Boston Bar Guide, nor Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, though it’s definitely a nearly forgotten forgotten as far as I can tell. I chose the San Diego Cocktail because 1. I was looking for more drinks that contained Dubonnet after last week’s introduction to this formidable ingredient. 2. As you read this, I’ll be in the middle of a solid week in San Diego County, most of it at Comic-Con, aka Cannes…
Author: Bob Westal
Bob Westal
Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
After doing these weekly posts for over eight years you’d think there wouldn’t be many significant cocktail ingredients left that I hadn’t yet at least tasted. Not really. This week I get to strike Dubonnet off that very slowly shrinking list. It’s a red wine that’s been fortified (boozed up) and aromatized (herbally fragranced up). It’s sweet, but a great deal less so than it’s first cousin, sweet vermouth. I’m not sure whether or not it’s made from actual red wine or if, like what used to be called Italian vermouth, it starts as a white wine and is made red during the…
A while back I took a fresh look at the Gimlet using real lime juice and sweetener instead of the more traditional and very sweet Rose’s Lime Juice. Today’s selection is essentially the same drink plus bitters and I think it’s probably better for it. Bitter flavors are to cocktails as bass is to music, and a sound ground floor improves a lot of drinks. The Bennett reportedly comes from 1922’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them, which I’m only just now purchasing. We are told that it’s named for a Chilean millionaire with a not particularly Chilean sounding name, though it’s said to…
For the luckier among us, we’re on the cusp of a four day July 4th weekend. This is a year when anyone who bothers to care will have at least a few contradictory feelings regarding the birthday of our great and greatly messed up nation. Still, it’s going to be hot in most of the United States and, with all the horrible crap that’s going on, we’re going to need to at least try and relax. Moreover, what could possibly be more purely and innocently American than lemonade and a lager-type beer? Well, since nothing is ever that simple, shandies…
Another bottle of quality booze has mysteriously arrived at DOTW Manor. This week it’s Nemiroff’s Honey Pepper Vodka. Longtime readers will note I don’t feature a lot (or any) flavored hard liquors, but I decided to make an exception mainly because this particular product is very well reviewed and I love sweet/hot combinations. Having now tasted the stuff on my own, I can say that, as flavored vodkas go, this may be as good as it gets. Considering, some of the flavored boozes from various companies I’ve tasted were good preparation for the stuff they make you drink to prep for…
I’m not always the best about hitting all the most widely celebrated holidays with fitting cocktails, but fate and an outstanding new brand of whiskey has given me a reason to promote a holiday two few of us know about. Juneteenth, which is this Wednesday, July 19th, is now a general celebration of the end of slavery in the United States, but it began as the day in 1865 when a Union Army general declared the end of slavery in Texas. A decade prior to that, an 8-year-old white boy named Jack Daniel began an apprenticeship on a Tennessee farm under…
“Nashville” comes as close as any movie has to encompassing the often dark heart of Americanism, and there’s certainly no way to boil this massive work down into any kind of a cocktail. You could make a stunt out of it and use 25 ingredients, one for every important character in Robert Altman’s 1975 tragicomic provocation. Nah. I have a day job; a simple drink with a strong, bittersweet flavor is the best I can do. I’m not a top-5 kind of a person, but Robert Altman’s “Nashville” is in a select category of great movies that I find progressively more engrossing…
As I continue my liquid salute to the 2019 TCM Classic Film Festival, we’re in the second half of a Mae Clarke double bill. An actress with a natural and easy charm, her entire career unjustly defined by a few seconds of film in which Jimmy Cagney’s tough guy gangster in “The Public Enemy” shoves half a grapefruit in her face. Show business is, of course, the toughest of rackets, and I may never learn why, after headlining beautifully in last week’s “Waterloo Bridge” and co-starring in “Frankenstein,” the citrus attack was literally the headline in her obituary when she passed on…
The official theme of the 2019 TCM Film Festival was love at the movies and, sucker that I am, I saw two films that hit me quite a bit harder than expected. One was “A Patch of Blue,” a 1963 Sidney Poitier drama gingerly dealing with a tentative but intense interracial relationship, proved to be far more involving and moving than I was really prepared for. Alas, naming a drink after that would involve blue curacao — which would not feel right — and a kind of molecular mixology well above my paygrade. Also, Shelley Winters’ boozing vile ultra-racist is enough to put anyone…
DOTW is back after an unexpectedly long break with the start of our annual four beverage salute to the most dipso-appropriate films I caught at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival. This was the event’s tenth anniversary and I’m happy to say that I’ve been at every one. For I believe the ninth time, I’ll be doing my best to come up with four half-way drinkable beverages I can pair with some remarkable movies. Directed by underrated classic-era journeyman Vincent Sherman, “All Through the Night” is regarded by many as a something of a forgotten classic. It’s definitely a lot of…