Wine Time
By Nikki Myers
Wise folks once said that three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and a dash of bitters pulling together any cocktail. ….At least, that’s how I remember it. In any case, I’m here to tell you about three cocktail ingredients that do more than their fair share of work in any recipe. Have you ever mixed up a cocktail, tasted it, and thought “this is okay, but it needs something.” Odds are, one of these ingredients would do just the trick in tying it all together.
Bitters: This seems like a no-brainer to anybody with an affinity for classic cocktails, but you’d be surprised how often they get forgotten in the modern sphere. Bitters are a neutral spirit heavily concentrated with any number of aromatic botanicals. They add a layer of complexity to any cocktail but are most famously used in the Old Fashioned. The most beautiful thing about bitters is that they come in a plethora of flavors – from lemon to blood orange, to celery. No matter the drink, there’s sure to be a flavor of bitters that will bring your cocktail to the next level. After all, we taste with our noses first! My favorite is Woodford Barrel-aged Chocolate Bitters. I’m never caught without these on hand, either at home or behind the bar.
Citrus: In food and drink alike, acidity is a crucial flavor when looking to achieve balance and depth. Without it, your flavors aren’t likely to bounce off of each other in the way they should. Odds are, your drink doesn’t need enough citrus for tartness to beats prominent flavor – if that were the case, you wouldn’t have forgotten it to begin with! But the best ingredients are the ones that could almost go unnoticed, shining from the shadows. Whether it’s orange, lime, grapefruit, or something more exotic, I guarantee it could probably find a useful place in your drink.
Ginger Beer: This one is probably the least expected of the bunch, but hear me out. It works in SO many unlikely places. This is the ingredient that makes me verge on being a one-trick pony behind the bar; I wind up wanting to use it so often that I have to be careful about overdoing it. It’s got a little bit of everything that a one-dimensional cocktail could need – bubbles, bite, and brightness. It’s the beverage equivalent of adding a hit of cayenne to your tomato sauce. Whenever I top off a drink with ginger beer, I imagine Emeril saying ”BAM!” triumphantly. Trust me on this one, gang.
When I’m using my coworkers as guinea pigs and having them try many iterations of a cocktail before serving it to the public at one of our events, they know that all of these ingredients are probably going to pop up more than once. They may poke fun at me at times, but in the end, nobody is complaining… if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, right?
Nikki serves as Event Leader and Educator at Passion Vines Wine & Spirit Company, which has provided her countless resources on her wine journey. She estimates that she knows approximately .001% of all there is to know about wine (most notably, the fact that there is an infinite amount of things to know about wine). Most nights, she can be found sipping quirky dry reds from obscure regions.
