Financial Times: Make mine a Stinger… why cognac cocktails are trending

Forget the Spicy Margarita – here’s what the mixologists will be ordering at the bar

The Spicy Margarita is everywhere – in plenty of bars I know it now accounts for half of all drinks sales. But what would we all be drinking if the bar world’s top tastemakers had their way? In my survey, brandy won by a landslide, with cognac, Armagnac and apple-based calvados all getting plenty of votes. “Cognac is the king of spirits, it’s got so much going on,” says Jake Burger, proprietor of Portobello Star in London’s Notting Hill. He recommends the 19th-century Cognac Cocktail – essentially an Old Fashioned made with brandy – “which is what we’d all be drinking today if phylloxera hadn’t wiped out all the French vineyards and turned America into a whiskey-drinking culture”. For a really authentic Cognac Cocktail, he says, use Sazerac de Forge & Fils cognac, which is modelled on pre-phylloxera recipes (£121, masterofmalt.com). Under the £80 mark he also likes Merlet XO, Fanny Fougerat Iris Poivré XO and Prunier VSOP. Armagnac comes highly recommended by Sipsmith co-founder and master distiller Jared Brown and Sebastian Tollius, beverage director of Eleven Madison Park’s new Clemente Bar. “It’s rustic, full of character and versatile,” says Tollius. He favours the small batch bottlings by French specialist PM Spirits (from $62.50, pmspirits.com). “Perfect [as a sub for whiskey] in classics like Manhattans or as a stand-in for cognac in a Vieux Carré.” Ennismore’s head of bars Robert Simpson makes the case for calvados, “which has flavours from crisp fresh fruit through to apple strudel”. Punch editor Talia Baiocchi agrees: “I love a simple calvados and tonic.”

PM Spirits VS Overproof VS Bas Armagnac, $62.50 for 75cl, pmspirits.com

Liqueurs were another strong performer – and particularly crème de menthe. Which would have shocked me had I not, uncharacteristically, found myself ordering a Stinger in the Spy Bar at Raffles London just recently. This minty digestif sees cognac laced with white mint liqueur; it’s typically shaken and served “up” in a coupe or over crushed ice. Spy Bar makes its own After Eight-infused crème de menthe, but Tempus Fugit (£31.50 for 70cl, bbr.com) is also excellent. Another liqueur due a revival, according to drinks writer and co-owner of the Pacific Standard in Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, is the monastic nightcap Bénédictine DOM (£31.25, thewhiskyexchange.com) – he favours the “sweet, peppery, herbal French liqueur” in a rye whiskey-based La Louisiane cocktail. NoMad London’s Leo Robitschek, meanwhile, pleads the case for amaretto, particularly in a sour. If there’s a common theme in all of this, it’s the after-dinner drink. Perhaps 2025 will see the red-hot Margarita make way for something a bit more smouldering. 

Stinger

Some might find this old-school 3:1 formula a bit heavy on the crème de menthe. If in doubt, start with less and then work your way up.  60ml VSOP cognac or armagnac 20ml white crème de menthe (such as Tempus Fugit) Method: Shake with ice and then either strain into a cocktail glass, sans ice, or serve over crushed ice in a rocks glass. 

Vinepair: Puntas — a High-ABV, Hyper-Traditional Style of Mezcal — Is Going Commercial

It was at the end of a tasting at Eli’s Mezcal Room, an underground mezcal tasting experience located in a local man’s New York apartment, when host “Eli” (not his real name) pulled out one final bottle he thought might interest me: an unlabeled plastic water bottle he had suitcased back from Mexico. It was extraordinarily aromatic and I could smell its vegetal, medicinal notes the second the Poland Spring’s lid was unscrewed. It likewise had a rich, intense, burning flavor — no surprise as it was nearly 70 percent ABV.

When alcohol comes off a still, the distiller cuts it into three parts, each descending in alcohol content, and generally referred to as the heads, the heart, and the tails. The most toxic elements, like methanol, are concentrated in the heads and tails, meaning many distillers across all spirits categories only bottle the hearts to be safe.

But this special mezcal Eli had served me was actually composed of all heads, which, besides methanol, also possess some incredibly aromatic, flavorful compounds like propanol, ethyl lactate, acetic acid, and furfural.

Though formerly the (strictly non-exported) handiwork of hyper-traditional mezcal, of late, puntas offerings are becoming increasingly commercialized and the category has even infiltrated the tequila world.

Puntas on the Palenque

Until recently, most Americans who would have tried puntas (the Spanish word for points, a synonym for heads) probably did so in a similar way to what I did. There aren’t really any commercial examples of it and, quite frankly, bottlings like the one I tasted might not even be legally allowed to be sold in this country for a variety of reasons.

“It’s definitely much more common to find it at the palenque (mezcal distillery),” says Noah Arenstein, who runs the mezcal program at The Cabinet in New York’s East Village. “Because either it’s being used to blend back into the final mezcal and adjust the ABV and flavor … or they’re saving it to drink for themselves.”

If The Cabinet has one of the world’s largest mezcal collections, the bar only has a few commercial examples of puntas. Indeed, Mezcal Reviews, an online database with over 1,800 mezcals listed, has only cataloged 11 puntas bottlings over the years.

La Venenosa, raicilla Puntas

La Venenosa Racilla Puntas is the first example Arenstein recalls seeing on shelves, circa 2016. (While also agave-based, raicilla is not the same as mezcal or tequila.) Cinco Sentidos shipped its first batch of Puntas de Espadín to the U.S. market in 2021. Two years earlier, Mal Bien had started offering Madrecuixe Puntas, which the producer called “the platonic ideal that we imagine spirits to be. Agave, boiled down to its very essence, the plant stripped of everything but its soul.”

“This was always something we would produce at the distillery, ever since we started producing in 2007.”

Cinco Sentidos espadín Puntas

Arenstein finds all the puntas releases have a unique, specific taste. “You get almost a hand sanitizer note,” he says. “You put it on your hand and it evaporates like, you know, a hand sanitizer without lotion would. It has a lightness and kind of effervescence to it.”

If that doesn’t sound too appealing, there’s the somewhat taboo aspect of drinking puntas to consider. Haven’t we long been told that heads are solvent-y in taste and dangerous to drink — not only high in ABV but high in methanol content. And can’t that make you go blind?!

“If I’m pouring puntas for someone I will sometimes preface it with that,” Arenstein says. While a well-cut puntas is certainly safe to drink in small portions, Arenstein admits he has definitely encountered mezcaleros (distillers) with a cloudy-eyed look that has made him wonder, if not concerned.

The Distiller’s Cut

Admittedly, any concerns Arenstein has are not enough to stop him from drinking delicious examples of the style as more and more expressions hit the market. And it’s not just mezcal (and raicilla) producers now sending puntas expressions stateside.

“I think distillation can get really complicated and geeky to the average person,” Estes says, “so we wanted to help people understand what makes this different and unique and special.”

The first release, produced from agave from the La Ladera estate, and distilled at La Alteña, which has been the Camarena family’s distillery since 1937, was cut at 64 percent ABV, though diluted with water to 101 proof. (While a traditional mezcal puntas would never be diluted, tequila can’t legally be bottled in America at higher than 110 proof or 55 percent ABV.)

It quickly became a cult hit, well reviewed on sites like Tequila Matchmaker where it currently scores a crowd-sourced average of 90 among the site’s community. It was also most mainstream tequila drinkers’ first introduction to the old mezcal term puntas. (In Jalisco, distillers use the more literal translation for heads: cabezas.)

“There’s bad borrowing that’s happening from the mezcal world and there’s some good borrowing. And in a way this feels like a good borrowing,” Arenstein says, referring to Ocho’s use of the term. (Estes is quick to note that Camarena’s great-grandfather was making what was known as “vino de mezcal” well before tequila was even a term or category.)