Ian Tuck with his collection of vintage spirits at his home in Toronto, Dec. 21, 2017.Marta Iwanek/The Globe and Mail
How far would you go to taste history? As in a splash of pre-Prohibition whisky or, better still, a vintage cocktail made with gin distilled back when Winston Churchill was still in office?
Most Canadians who've had the pleasure were probably out of the country at the time. The pre-Castro Bacardi cocktails at London's Savoy Hotel are famous, as are the slightly more affordable drinks made with 50-year-old Campari at the Milk Room in Chicago. A quick search reveals more than a dozen vintage cocktail options around the world – none of which are in Canada.
But, if you ask around, very discreetly, you'll find they exist here, too. At the time of writing, there were at least three secret vintage-cocktail experiences on offer in Canada. This isn't the kind of "secret" that is actually a marketing ploy, either. Bars selling vintage spirits in Canada are risking their licences.
"Given the laws of the land, it's a pretty dodgy proposition," explains Simon Ogden, bar manager at Veneto Tapa Lounge in Victoria. "You'd have to try to convince a liquor inspector that you bought a 1928 Cognac through the LDB [B.C.'s Liquor Distribution Branch]."
Ogden doesn't think it's terribly likely an inspector would try to bust a bar catering to cocktail nerds sampling $400 time-capsule cocktails but, in the industry, licences are essential to livelihood. As such, we can't reveal the name or location of the pioneering Canadian bar that established a robust vintage-cocktail program nearly four years ago – well ahead of the curve. We can, however, tell you how it came to be. The bartender had been inspired at Canon, a Seattle bar owned by ex-pat Canadian Jamie Boudreau, who has assembled one of the best vintage whisky collections in the world.
"The whisky is priced so far out of the reach of the average guest, that you'd just sit there and think, 'Yeah, maybe I'll come in one day and spend $600 on a shot of 1915 Crown Royal,'" the bartender says, speaking on condition of anonymity. "So my idea was to develop a vintage program but select spirits that you could make cocktails with."
One advantage to his approach is that most other spirits – Campari, gin or Fernet, for example – tend to be less expensive than whisky. Another advantage, though, was mostly based on a hunch that it'd be easier to get people interested in cocktails than straight shots.
"With cocktails, you've got this mental reference point," he says. "It's like, 'Oh, I've had plenty of Manhattans but let's have one from 1920 and see what that tastes like.'"
He took a gamble on a couple of bottles back in 2013. When they sold, his boss gave him a "blank cheque" to build a library big enough to offer a small cocktail list of vintage drinks.
That inspired a few imitators – a $40 vintage gin martini popped up at a bar last year and, earlier this year, another Canadian bar offered a $400 Sazerac made with 1928 Armagnac. The hefty prices reflect the cost of the base ingredients; many individual bottles fetch between $600 and $1,500 at auction or through private dealers. The program also inspired quite a few private collectors, such as Toronto's Ian Tuck, and Cooper Tardivel, who works at Bar Kismet in Halifax.
"If you have the luxury of having a home bar with a few vintage spirits and you can make, say, a modern-day and a vintage Negroni," Tardivel says, "you'll notice the first is bright and fresh and the vintage one is round and savoury and silky, silky smooth."
In Toronto, Tuck, who also owns Bon Vivant Spirits Agents, was drawn into this semi-obsessive hobby when he tried a vintage Chartreuse flight at New York's Pouring Ribbons. Since the spirit is ostensibly the same formula since the beginning of time, it was an ideal way to taste the effect of bottle aging.
But, like Tardivel, the real thrill for Tuck comes from mixing with them. A couple of months ago, a guest saw his collection and spotted "Amaro Cora," which he said was a rare ingredient in a lost cocktail – the Amarosa.
"So we actually got to make the cocktail," Tuck says. "And that's where it gets most exciting. If you can actually find an ingredient that's name-checked in an old cocktail book and use it, that's great."
Recently, Victoria's Ogden got to experience a similar thrill when out at a cocktail bar. For his birthday, his staff sent him to the bar with the $400 Sazerac and pre-ordered it for him.
"I can say, having drank a $400 vintage Sazerac, it was truly extraordinary, critically speaking," he says, noting that the spirit, itself, was unctuous and complex. "There's something about tasting a cocktail as close as we can get it to how it would have tasted in the golden age. Because that's really what we're tasting – a different era."
A little sip of time travel, which, if you're in the know, or ask the right people, you might not have to travel so far to sample.
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