Nice bottle

Stare at booze bottles all day (and night) and you start to appreciate ones that stick out. These bottles hold Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne, and are ribbed for your pleasure.

Booze News Roundup

I'm still catching up on work after travel, but here are some items out of my inbox and into your eye socket:

• Domaine Carneros received their organic certification, making them California's first organic sparkling winery
• Pernod Ricard bought Absolut, and will likely get rid of Plymouth gin and Fris vodka it bought as part of the deal (clarification edit: sell to another spirits company, not dissolve the brands!)
• Gin is in! I guess it finally hit Los Angeles, anyway. There are some good tips on how to work with gin in cocktails in this article.
• Eric Ellestad's Savoy Project and Alembic's Savoy night get coverage in the Wall Street Journal (see also, my story from October)
• All you need to do to become a member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club is do a shot... with a severed toe in it.
• In April, Scala's Bistro offers a three-martini prix fixe lunch. Yes, it's a lunch that includes three martinis along with food.

Many thanks to Blair who passes along tidbits.

Get bubbly

Today's Chronicle Wine Section is the all-bubbly issue. They have a section on cocktails with bubbly and Gary Regan complains that David Wondrich won't pay his bar tab, which somehow is the lead-up to the Prince of Wales' Cocktail. I just wrote about an inside-out champagne flute.

Champagne drinking tips

1. Do not drink champagne. It is evil.
2. Do not not drink champagne at Jardiniere's relaunch party, where Thad Vogler made seven kinds of punch, all of them with champagne. The punches may taste magnificent and restore your faith in the entire punch category, but you should not try them. They will tempt you to continue drinking them because they are so light and refreshing. It is a slippery slope.
3. Do not do this starting at 6PM for the next three to four hours. You may note that Tracy Chapman, who is also at the party, looks not a day older than she did in 1988. Do not tell her.
4. Do eat something if you are going to be drinking champagne, which you should not do. Why do you have to be such a vegetarian snob when appetizers are all meaty and delicious?
5. Do not continue on to the "after-hours," the hour being 10PM. If you do, it is likely they will serve you champagne.
6. Remember, champagne is evil. Do not continue to drink the champagne.
7. Do remember how you got home. It was probably not on a magic toboggan sliding along rainbows. It was probably not before 11PM.
8. Do treat each champagne drinking session as a learning experience. Reflect on why you chose to drink champagne for the next 14 hours in bed with your pounding head under the covers.
9. Do not get out of bed only to attend a tasting of 300 sakes.

Tales of the Cocktail Recipes

In what will be a long, relentless buildup to the Tales of the Cocktail event in New Orleans this July (I'm probably going) they held a recipe contest to determine the official cocktail for the event. The winners were announced yesterday. All the winners of the event were bartenders from New Orleans, with the exception of Forbidden Island Alameda's Martin Cate, who tied for third place with a nicely simple recipe called the Crescent City Blossom. All the entrants were required to use Moet & Chandon White Star as an ingredient, so if you're looking for a new champagne cocktail, I recommend checking out the winners. Interesting to note that in Monday's Moet Rose cocktail competition in SF at least two of the entrants used the new St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur as does Martin's recipe, so I guess we can safely say it mixes well with champagne. A couple of the Tales of the Cocktail winners used Pama Pomegranate Liqueur, which also works well with bubbly.

Pink Delicious

Last night I was one of the judges at the Think Pink event at Harry Denton's Starlight Room. It was a cocktail competition to see which bartender could create the best drink using Moet & Chandon Rose champagne. Many of the usual suspects were mixing- bartenders from Range, Bourbon & Branch, Rye, and Tres Agaves, plus people from Circolo, Eastside West, and Le Colonial. They made champagne drinks using vodka, gin, fortified wines, tequila, and even scotch. They infused their own vodka, made their own simple syrups, and created wild rims and garnish. The bartenders showed great originality and range, and honestly all the drinks were excellent. In the end, the drink we chose as the winner had the worst name (Pink Cream Soda) but a truly original flavor. It was a tall rocks drink that did taste creamy, but started out with the taste of a muddled jalapeno that somehow didn't dominate the flavor. So congratulations to Todd Smith of Bourbon & Branch for winning the competition, and to all the bartenders who entered. The winning drink will go on the Starlight Room menu, and I hope to see some other of these drinks on cocktail menus around town.

Cocktails at Perbacco

Several weeks ago I went for cocktails at the new restaurant Perbacco in downtown SF. The after-work bar scene needs no advertisement from me, as it gets packed nightly around happy hour. I was meeting a representative from the PR agency for the restaurant, so between the two of us I was able to try four cocktails. They were all pretty tasty. The Rosemarino is made with vodka, lemon, rosemary simple syrup, apple brandy, and has a big sprig of rosemary in it. It starts off subtle but as the sprig of rosemary infuses into the drink it gets stronger. I'm not a huge rosemary fan so I would have picked out the garnish halfway through like I do with olives. The Dieci is right up with alley, made with Campari, gin, and grapefruit juice. It's like a negroni with even-more bitter grapefruit swapped in for sweet vermouth. Hell, yeah. I never used to like grapefruit juice after a bad experience with grapefruit and Southern Comfort in high school (funny how I never gave up the whiskey) but I've had a few drinks lately that use it and I've loved them so I think it's time to stop worrying and love the juice. We also had a Pearlini, which is a modified Bellini (champagne and peach) instead made with prosecco, pear brandy, fresh pear, and cinnamon. It was really great, and didn't remind me of a fluffy champagne cocktail at all. The last drink I had (I don't see its name on the menu I have at home) was made with a ton of pomegranate and tasted almost like a thick winter spiced drink. The bartender said it was named after his grandmother. Awww, shucks. Anyway, this is a bar to add to the list of downtown spots with good cocktail programs, or your other list of restaurants to drink in.

The Champagne Cocktail and the French 75

My story in today's Chronicle:

Leftover Champagne? Sacre bleu! Time for Champagne cocktails Camper English, Special to The Chronicle Friday, December 1, 2006 The majority of Champagne cocktails served around the Bay Area are fruit-flavored drinks like the mimosa and Bellini, and sparkling berry drinks by different names. However, a couple of classic Champagne cocktails are bubbling up on drink menus. The original Champagne cocktail is made by dropping an Angostura bitters-soaked sugar cube into a Champagne flute and filling with sparkling wine or Champagne. It is one of the few drinks today that is made just as it was when the recipe was first printed in Jerry Thomas' 1862 book "How to Mix Drinks," believed to be the first published bartending guide.

Read the rest of the story here.