Monday, June 29 2009

Mixing Your Drinks

Things go better with Kalimotxo?

Two things combined this week to make me feel both out of touch and completely excused for my cultural ignorance. The first was my discovery of a drink called Calimocho, or as the originators spell it, 'Kalimotxo' (apparently tx is pronounced 'ch' in Basque).

Years ago when I worked in another industry I attended a banquet where the wife of an executive tasted the (quite good, actually) red wine served with the entree and declared it 'sour'. She then poured it into her half-emptied glass of Coca-Cola™ and ice and pronounced it much improved. At the time I thought it was a bit declassé, and the memory stuck with me. So imagine my surprise when I read Bill Wood's column on the practice of mixing red wine and cola.

According to Wikipedia,

It is not clear where the name comes from. In early 70s it was called Rioja Libre or Cuba Libre del pobre (poor man's Cuba Libre) in some Spanish provinces.

The current name, "Kalimotxo", is attributed to the "Antzarrak cuadrilla" ("Geese young friends circle"), which supposedly coined it during the 1972 Puerto Viejo festivities (in Algorta, Getxo, Biscay). Legend has it that the servers in one of the "txosnas" (stands in Basque festivals where drinks are served) noticed that the wine they had bought was not in good condition, so they decided to mix it with something to kill the sour taste. The inventors of the mixture named it after two friends of the cuadrilla known as "Kalimero" (after the Calimero chicken character) and "Motxo", hence the name "Kalimotxo". The name caught on and became popular throughout Spain.

I'm a suspicious type, so I looked it up, and not only does it appear to be a truthful and real thing, but also it's fairly widespread: Chile, Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Yugoslav Republic, Hungary, etc, all have their local versions. Now, the thing I noticed from the list is that the local wines in these countries are often pretty rough. Some readers will object that Chile makes some very fine wine, and they do: but they have almost no indigenous fine-wine culture and the vast majority of the good stuff is exported, and the locals get Pais, a grape best suited for distilling, not wine. The other countries have potential, but produce more um, value-oriented wine than high-end bottles.

So what's the process? Apparently you mix 50-50 your favorite cola and red wine, and serve over plenty of ice. This would result in a beverage of about 6-7% alcohol, depending on how steady your hands are, and a sweet, lightly carbonated taste that would go down easily.

Hey, stop! You're getting them mixed up!

Fill a glass with cubes and enjoy!

Mmm, Cabernet-Cola

Okay so it sounds disgusting to me. So I had to try it. I went downstairs and bought a can of cola and pulled the half-bottle of Sonoma Cabernet I had in the cellar, and poured a half 'n' half mix over ice.

How was it? Well, to be fair I don't drink soda, except for a glass of root beer a couple of times a year. It tastes too much like liquid candy for me to enjoy it as a beverage. Mixing it with red wine was . . . well, it wasn't helpful. if you had some cheap sour wine, a powerful thirst and the sort of mind that enjoys odd tastes, it would be just the thing on a very hot day when there wasn't any beer. Or water. Or anything else. That's why I stopped feeling bad about my culturo-beverage ignorance: I haven't been forced to drink off-tasting wine for decades: if a batch doesn't meet my expectations, I sewer it rather than choke it down, a luxury afforded to me because I make my own and I'm in charge of how it turns out.

But that's me: curmudgeonly and resistant to change. If anyone out there has a perfect food pairing or a recipe for a better Kalimotxo, let me know. But you don't have to share the Kalimotxo with me--I'm sticking to . . . anything else.

Posted by Tim AT 6:16PM

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