"The Devil of the Andes"

Latin Trade,  Nov, 1999  by Sally Bowen

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Pisco, the brandy of Peru, is fighting quality concerns to become better known abroad.

IF YOU ARE "BETWEEN PISCO AND NAZCA," ACCORDING TO AN old Peruvian saying, you are happily inebriated. And in the small coastal town of Ica, which lies geographically between Pisco and Nazca, its inhabitants are frequently to be discovered in the state that the saying describes.

"Everyone in the area who has a plot of land and a vine makes his own pisco," Felix, the bartender at Ica's up-market Las Dunas hotel, says as he mixes cocktails made with the liquor, a colorless grape brandy, for visitors. "People still tread the grapes and make it as they have done for centuries. And when there is anything to celebrate--and that's quite often hereabouts--out it comes."

Felix is mixing Peru's national drink, the pisco sour. He does it with panache, not bothering much to measure quantities. The recipe is not complex: three parts pisco, two parts sugar syrup and one part freshly squeezed key lime juice. Into the blender it goes, with plenty of ice and some egg white. A quick whiz and Felix is pouring out the frothy mixture and shaking a little ground cinnamon on top. "Delicious," the tourists respond. "That's how foreigners like it," Felix says. "Peruvians usually prefer it drier, with only one part syrup."

Despite its popularity inside Peru, pisco is little known abroad. That is hardly surprising, given that only a 10th of the 8,400 hectares devoted to grape-growing in Peru produce the varieties from which pisco is made. Annual production is some 1.2 million liters, and a large percentage of that is the "informal" pisco made in the Ica and Moquegua valleys, which never gets more than a few miles from where it is produced. Exports have rarely topped $250,000 a year.

Still, Peru's Export Promotion Commission (Prompex) is campaigning to get pisco better known. "It's the product that, above all others, reflects Peru and its history," says Fernando Ego-Aguirre, who looks after pisco and other niche exports for Promex and is also head of the National Pisco Commission.

Pisco was born in the desert coastal region south of Lima, where the Paracas culture--famed for its extraordinarily fine textiles--flourished between 300 B.C. and 200 A.D. Although the area looks depressingly barren except where it is crossed by rivers running down from the high Andes to the east, the ancient civilizations mastered the art of irrigation, channeling the precious water so that barely a drop was wasted. In the Ica area, a wide variety of plants and fruits flourished. When the Spanish conquerors arrived in the area in the 16th century, they discovered ideal conditions for planting the vines they had brought from the Canary Islands.

The origins of the name have nothing to do with alcohol. In Quechua, "pisscu" means a small bird. The name was bestowed to the oasis-like plains where condors and other mountain birds stopped to rest between the high Andes and the Pacific Ocean in search of food. Skilled potters living in the area were also known as "piscos." They fashioned containers made of adobe, or baked mud, used to ferment a variety of alcoholic beverages. As the years passed, pisco came to be used to designate either the drinking vessels, the people who made them or their contents.

Somewhat confusingly, Pisco is also the name of the port from which the grape brandy was shipped. Today, it is a rather unprepossessing town surrounded by fish meal-processing plants. But it appears on maps that date back to the late 16th century. During the 17th and 18th centuries, few Spanish ships sailed from Pisco without large consignments of the sweet-tasting but potent brandy on board. Historical records show that much was exported along the Pacific seaboard to Valparaiso to the south and Guayaquil to the north, as well as to Spain.

The oldest mention of pisco is found in 1613, when historian Lorenzo Huertas wrote of a will in which a master bequeathed to his slave "vats full of brandy and a large copper cauldron" in which she could prepare it. In 1630, Spanish chronicler Francisco Lopez de Caravantes called pisco "one of the most exquisite liquors that can be drunk in the entire world."

Today, surprisingly little has changed about the way it is made. In a simple, rustic process, the grapes are pressed and the fresh juice is heated until it evaporates, then cooled. Water is never added to dilute it. The resulting "brandy" is transparent or slightly amber in color with a pure alcohol content of between 38 degrees and 46 degrees proof.

Varieties are classified by their taste, rather than their scent. There is pure pisco, generally favored by pisco connoisseurs and made from the Quebranta grape, a non-aromatic variety that is the result of genetic mutations of the ordinary black grape introduced by the Spaniards. Then there is the aromatic pisco made from grapes such as Italia, Torontel and Moscatel, which has a distinctive scent. Pisco acholado is made from a blend of varieties, both aromatic and Quebranta. Finally "green" pisco is made from only partially fermented juices. Locals like to vary their pisco diet by flavoring it with local fruits, including fig, mango, cherry, lemon or chirimoya (custard apple).