As a younger scholar, I had a chance to spend a short term at Sciences Po Bordeaux in France. If you’ve never been, Bordeaux is a great place. As you can imagine, it’s home to excellent food and drink. The wine speaks for itself, but the cheese and charcuterie scene is great too. If you travel around, even some of the Basque delicacies from Northern Spain make their way across the border.

It’s also an area of rich history and struggle. The English and French fought over the territory during the Hundred Years’ War. When I was there, I had an interesting exchange with a bartender on my first evening. After finding a pub, I bellied up and wanted to take the edge off with a beer after a long journey. My conversation with the young man proceeded as follows:

Bartender (IN ENGLISH): Why, are you English?

I was never really sure how to take this exchange, even though we became pals over the next several weeks. It almost seemed like, had I been English, he’d given thought to showing me he could speak English, then refusing to use English. It made me genuinely contemplate whether the Hundred Years’ War still lingered in the pubs of Bordeaux, or whether the reputation of English tourists was even shoddier than that of Americans. I do know that during the rugby championships, the bars were full of patrons rooting for matches that did not affect French hopes, in a concerted effort to “stop” England from winning the overall title.

England has faced periods where friends are few and far between, not unlike the United States at the moment. Probably something having to do with colonialism, mercantilism, and invasions, but who knows. I do know that a historical pillar of this resistance was the French-Scottish alliance — the Auld Alliance. I mentioned this when penning Scottish Sandie last week. As I read about the Auld Alliance, I began to think about what that alliance might look like in a cocktail.

Simple cocktails are great, and one of my favorites is a French Connection - a marriage of Cognac (something I truly adore) and Amaretto, a simple two-ingredient drink packed with nuanced flavor. All Cognacs are brandy, but not all brandies are Cognac - it comes from a specific town in France and is made (somewhat surprisingly to me, though I don’t know why) from white grapes. Amaretto is, of course, Italian. It is, sensibly, made from the pits of Apricots, which give the namesake liqueur a deep, rich almond flavor. 

From this basic recipe, we have Auld Alliance. I’m simply substituting Drambuie for the Amaretto. Drambuie is a Scottish liqueur made from heather honey, herbs, and spices. My old friend, Chris Huffer, an excellent meteorologist at The ROC in Norman, Oklahoma, first introduced me to Drambuie in his favorite cocktail, a Rusty Nail. The Drambuie works really well with the Cognac here, and the drink’s harmony reflects the longstanding friendship between France and Scotland.

Chill your glass. This is a stirred drink. Add all the ingredients, sans garnish, in a mixing glass. Load the mixing glass with ice and stir until the drink is well-chilled. Fine-strain the cocktail into your glass over a large berg of handcrafted ice. Express the orange oils over the drink and add the twist to garnish. Best enjoyed with allies on a cold, late night!

In theory, you could build this in the glass. But, I like the extra bit of dilution from using the mixing glass, because it allows a bit more Drambuie, and hence, flavor than building in the glass. If building in the glass, you’d benefit from reducing the Drambuie to ½ oz. Using a mixing glass lengthens the drink enough to slip a bit more in without overwhelming it. And to that point, Drambuie is not your typical liqueur - it’s 80 proof, the same as a typical base spirit. So, the proof doesn’t suffer here from the mixing.

I don’t often argue about glassware, but I will say this: a lot of stirred, booze-forward drinks would be better in brandy snifters. They are designed with Cognac in mind and are unparalleled at centering the aromatics on your olfactory senses as you sip. I strongly recommend it to get the softer, more volatile aromatics of Cognac and the sweet spice of Drambuie on your nose. By contrast, a rocks glass allows them to disperse widely, escaping before you can enjoy them. And that’s bad, because taste and flavor are heavily dependent on smell. Add lets face it, drinks are about experience and how you feel about yourself as much as anything - there’s something regal about holding a snifter late at night while talking about frivolous things.

You could add some aromatic bitters (i.e., “old-fashioned” bitters). I chose not to because I have already gone to the trouble of getting the softer aromatics of the Cognac and the honey and spices in the Drambuie, but you do you.

If you’d like a bit more orange in the drink, you could also deploy the regal stir here - adding an orange peel to the mixing glass while stirring. Using the orange twist over the top imparts strong orange aromas to the cocktail, but a regal stir will add just a bit more orange flavor alongside the bitters. I perched the orange peel atop the berg of ice so that I could get both worlds - the aromatics at the outset and the subtle flavor as it sinks below the Cognac waves.

This blog is, as ever, an opinionated take on drinks.