A Toast to 2009’s New Cocktails

Hope everyone has recovered from any latent New Year’s Eve immoderation that might have occurred in the alcoholic-beverage category. (I managed to refrain from wretched excess, other than one potion reminiscent of a drowned shot of cherry brandy in some pink, fizzy liquid that mysteriously appeared in my hand...any identification is welcome.) And in the spirit of the season, National Public Radio recently broadcast “Cocktails: A Liquid Year In Review,” an interview with Ted Haigh, curator of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans, and author of “Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails.”

Haigh predicts a swing back toward classic cocktails and away from anything ending in “-tini.” He suggests keeping a lookout for a concoction “originally conceived to be consumed in the morning to revive the corpse again,” called, not coincidentally, Corpse Reviver No. 2. (Leading one to imagine in vivid Technocolor what the problem might have been with Corpse Reviver No. 1.) Version No. 2 consists of an ounce of London dry gin, an ounce of Cointreau, an ounce of Lillet blanc, an ounce of fresh lemon juice and several drops of absinthe.

In a similarly themed vein, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and Air America news commentator, recently celebrated the American classic cocktail, with her favorite, the Jack Rose—a drink based on applejack—in a virtual mixology demonstration. Her most important hint: if it’s plastic on the outside or says “Rose’s” on the label, it’s not really lime juice.

Nielsen forecasts that, in the spirit world, brown is the new white: “while sales trends have typically favored white spirits in recent years, U.S. sales growth for whisky and brown spirits is outperforming the growth rate of the overall spirits category in 2008.”

Even I, a person who generally needs to blow the dust off the bottles of liquor in my cabinet, tried my hand at shaking and blending up a few new cocktails this holiday. While it’s not product development as we normally practice it, it’s undoubtedly a lesson in flavor blending, fraught with successes and failures. And liquor certainly has long provided a spirited muse—perhaps in more ways than one—for flavoring items from sauces to chips to cakes

On that note: Cheers; and here’s to the spirit of successful product development in 2009 and wishes for peace and prosperity to all.

   —Lynn A. Kuntz