Daiquiri Cocktail

Since the confinement started, I’ve been doing a daily Apéro Hour on Instagram Live, archiving some of the episodes on my IGTV channel. Since I’ve never been able to get a tv show of my own, I decided just to do my own. (What could go wrong? And even so, what happens during confinement, stays in confinement. Right?) And when you’re the boss…and the producer, talent booker, presenter, cameraman, mixologist, and dishwasher…you get to call the shots. So I did, and invited some of my favorite bartenders, cocktail writers, and spirit-makers to come and talk about what they do.

Due to quirk in the platform, split-screen interviews can’t be archived (so I don’t get to call all the shots…) but it’s been really fun having people on that you might not normally get to meet, like my friend Mat who distills brandy and gin in Burgundy, Margot who owns Combat, a great cocktail bar in Paris, David from Belleville Brûlerie who showed us how to make the perfect café crème with a moka pot, and Alexandre Gabriel, who not only distills cognac and Citadelle gin, but also makes rum.

(Update: After publishing this post and recipe, the company announced that it be changing their name. The pictures show the previous bottle of rum that I used when writing this post. When they decide on a new name, I’ll edit the post to reflect that.)

I met Alexandre years ago on a press trip to cognac. Press trips can be great because you get behind-the-scenes access to see how things are made. The downside is that the organizers pack as much as possible into each day, so you’re leaving your hotel room at 7am and you don’t get back until close to midnight. On that particular trip, we had zero free time as we zoomed from one place to another, with little time to even have lunch, let alone breathe.

At one point, I begged to stay in my hotel room and write a story while it was fresh in my mind, about visiting the coopers who make cognac barrels, but instead I had to sit through a PowerPoint presentation in a curtained-off beige conference room, where we reviewed slides about statistics, sales, market shares, and percentages.

I was a little miffed because I didn’t think my readers were all that interested in that stuff, so I stewed in the dark room, waiting to get back out there and see something you would be interested in. (It does help if one keeps in mind that press trips aren’t considered vacations. You are there to work, although one nice perk involved tasting a lot of cognac.) After the slide show, and we were let out into the light, we took the bus to one last distillery for the day.

And folks, let me tell you, I was dragging. As we filed into yet another distillery lorded over by giant copper alembic stills, a well-dressed man came out with a booming, cheerful voice, welcoming us to Maison Ferrand.

It was a great visit and I was instantly charmed by him, and his wife, who finished the day by inviting us to a barbeque at their family home afterward. So I wanted to return the invitation and invite him to be a guest on my Instagram Live. Readers were asking for rum drinks, and since he is the maker of excellent rum, I asked him to shake up any rum-based cocktail of his choice. When he mentioned the word Daiquiri, I quickly agreed. Who doesn’t want a daiquiri?

Alexandre used his Stiggins Fancy Pineapple Rum, infused with Victoria pineapples. Popular in France, the slender, choice pineapples are smaller and more compact than standard pineapples.  They tend to have less water in them because they are raised in elevated areas that don’t use irrigation, so they are sweeter and more concentrated in flavor than other types of pineapples. In France, they’re so prized, you can even find them candied whole. I’m happy to have one in my home bar, in a bottle, which gets put to very good use in this tropically-tinged Daiquiri.