Tale of Two Drinks

La Comapnia de Jesus, Cusco, Peru

In the city of Cusco, I felt the legacy of the Spanish like nowhere else in Peru. Graceful plazas, grand houses with balconies, and imposing churches evoked old world charms in the former capital of the far-conquering Incas. Wandering around the historic city on foot, I occasionally experienced geographical confusion. Was I truly 11,200 feet high in the South American sierra and far from Western Europe?

It’s not only Cusco’s architecture that reflects the heavy hand of the conquistadors. There’s also pisco, Peru’s national drink, found at many of the city’s swank restaurants surrounding the elegant main plaza. Not unlike Italian grappa, pisco is a clear grape brandy that’s fiery, fierce, and fruity. Until the Spanish arrived there were no grapes for wine or distilled spirits.

LIMO, a restaurant in Cusco

Having read in the New York Times last summer that pisco is asserting itself in the U.S. market,  I made it my duty to explore as many different expressions of this spirit as I could. I was lucky enough to stumble across the refined restaurant LIMO, where the young head bartender took it upon himself to educate me. Each night I went, I sat at the hip bar and Gawd started me with a carefully prepared cocktail and then chose a pisco for me to drink straight with the restaurant’s artistic Japanese-Peruvian food. On my last night, I even had pisco with dessert. After three nights of intense experimentation, my clear favorite was the aromatics, made from moscato, italia, or torontel grapes, which exude floral notes that elude the heat of the alcohol. Delicious!

Machu Picchu

My three-night stay in Cusco was broken up by three nights in the majestic Sacred Valley, culminating with a trip by train to Machu Picchu. Out in the green, steep valleys, the grip of the Spanish subsides, and pre-Columbian Peru emerges. I experienced this fully in a small village where I had hiked to explore an out-of-the-way Incan ruin. It wasn’t just the stones that brought me to Pucamarca; it was also the chance to try chicha, the true drink of Peru.

Red bag on a pole, indicating a chicha house

If pisco is the potable mark of the Spanish, chicha, a fermented corn drink  is the enduring legacy of the Incas. In fact, if you want to know how most Incas lived, just visit a chicha house. You can find one by looking for a red plastic bag flying on a modest wooden pole. When seen at the pole, you’ll be led through small open courtyards with chickens to the correct house by someone in the village. Once inside the one-room house you might encounter, as I did, the matriarch doing laundry by hand in a bucket on the dirt floor, a small wood fire for cooking in one corner, a pot of fermenting chica in another corner, and opposite the woman, two men, one middle age, one old, drinking large plastic cups of chicha, chatting in Quechua, the indigenous language of the Andes, and listening to an old radio hanging from the adobe wall.

Men drinking chica in Pucamarca

As much as I cherished the experience, being the only tourist in the village, sampling Peru’s native corn beer, and being transported back in time, I am afraid to admit that I wasn’t a fan: chicha is too thick to quaff and simultaneously sweet and sour. I’d rather have pisco.

Vat of chicha, Pucamarca

If you’d like to try some pisco, you will probably be able to find a bottle at a well-stocked liquor store (there will be brands from either Peru or Chile, the other South American country that claims it as their national drink, and shake up (and shake it hard to froth the egg whites) a pisco sour. Limes are aplenty at Sickles, as well as a selection of cocktail bitters.

Diana Pittet, the adventurous cheesemonger