Curing Beaujolais Nouveau at
Marikita cocktail bar
Thursday night was the annual launch of the Beaujolais nouveau.
Alright, it's good fun to be drinking a bottle as cheap as a bus ticket with a
label that looks like a painting made by your 5 years old nephew. But by the
next day it's very likely that the beverage will have killed 50% of all your
taste buds and brain cells (No offence to Beaujolais lovers, there are some
very nice bottles and crus, but too many Beaujolais nouveau taste like lightly
flavoured water).
Anyway, the next day, we decided to explore what else our delicious
fermented grapes could offer us and we headed to the Marikita cocktail
bar near Place de la Bourse in Bordeaux for a well-deserved
“hair of the dog” cocktail. And we were nicely surprised by the selection of
cocktails, well decorated room and friendliness of the bartender. By
wine cocktails we include everything that comes from fermented grapes:
red (not an easy one), white, rosé, sparkling and distilled grapes.
After long discussions with
our bartender about wine cocktails, a good review of the cocktail list, 5
cigarettes and 3 return tickets to the bathrooms we finally ordered a round of
cocktails. Here are two that really caught our attention:
Plaisir charnel (we also loved the
name):
3 layers in this cocktail
(from bottom to top):
§ 2 teaspoons of
freshly crushed raspberries marinated in Cachaça
§ 5cl of mango purée
mixed with Cachaça
§ Top up your glass
with champagne (7cl)
Serve with a bit of crushed
ice and enjoy!
The sweetness of the
raspberries and mango is nicely balanced with the dry bubbly champagne. The
result is an exotic refreshing sparkly cocktail!
A special cocktail created
this year for the harvest as a tribute to local products:
Presented in 3 glasses:
§ The first looks
more like a bowl filled up with white grapes and a star anise.
§ The second is
shooter glass 2/3 filled with a home-made mix of spices and orange liqueur and
1/3 of Cointreau.
§ In the third tall
glass is 3 cl of Cognac, 3 cl Lillet Blanc,
topped up with passion fruit and mandarin zest
To serve, light the shooter
glass, leave it a minute and poor the flambée mixture over
the grapes. Eat the soaked grapes with a fork while drinking your Cognac
cocktail!
Both cocktails were very good, the second has a more interesting
presentation and is more entertaining to consume and prepare.
Premium ingredients were used in these cocktails but you can easily replace the
champagne by a Crémant or the fruit purée by juices to
lower the costs.
Be careful, those cocktails might seem gentle and exotic but the
sweetness covers a very generous amount of alcohol! And in no time you
could find yourself living another Beaujolais nouveau experience (with more
flavours this time). Keep up with more posts on wine cocktails next week!