Supercherry tasting with the LCS
Supercherry are a company who import Italian food and spirits to the UK. Last night I got to try some of their products with the London Cocktail Society.
We tried three products: Their Visciolata cherry wine, their Aquavite del Cardinale, and their pistachio cream liqueur.
The cherry wine was rich and fruity, with quite a lovely almond finish. While it was clearly a dessert wine, and was correspondingly quite sweet, it stopped well short of being excessively so to me. It had a richness that was possibly heading slightly in the direction of a port. We only tried it in small quantities, and I feel like a full wine glass of it would be overwhelming, but as a small drink it was delicious. There was also a cocktail on the menu using it (which I didn't try), and I think it would work well with mixing - you could almost use it as a sweet vermouth substitute. I'm definitely going to be buying a bottle of this to experiment with (or just drink straight!).
The aquavite was... interesting. Rob described as "Like a grappa but more heteronormative" (excuse me, "feminine"), which is about right. It was clearly a strong spirit, but it was much softer and more drinkable than you'd expect, with a sensation like the very gentlest of whiskies. The flavour was mostly the almonds of the cherry stones with just a hint of the fruity sweetness. It was a little reminiscent of the core flavour of sloe gin, but with none of the tartness or sugar.
My reservation about the aquavite is simply that I don't know what to do with it. There were no cocktails on the menu using it, though apparently they do exist, and I can't imagine myself being in a situation where I wanted to drink neat spirits and this was what I reached for. Given some recipes to use it in I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but I think first I need to find a bar with some cocktails that use it.
The pistachio cream liqueur... my feelings about are much more mixed. I had a cocktail with it in - basically a flip with this, lime and vanilla vodka - which was very pleasant indeed. More of a dessert than what I normally look for in a cocktail (and it vanished correspondingly quickly), but still very good - like pistachio ice cream in cocktail form. On it's own however the liqueur was far too cloying. This isn't a problem per se - many ingredients don't work on their own - but it's compounded by the fact that it's a milk based liqueur with a low ABV so isn't going to last. So for my part I think if I really wanted pistachio cream based cocktails I would just... make pistachio cream. There's no complicated hard to replicate distillation process going on here - it's basically just pistachios, sugar, milk and vodka. On the other hand, if you're less inclined to make pistachio cream from scratch and think you'll get through a bottle of this at an acceptable rate, it is a very nice ingredient and I recommend it too. It's apparently also very good as a sauce on ice cream, so there's that.
All in all, a good evening. An interesting company with some very good products, and at least one "excuse me I'm going to go buy this now" product.