SPIRITED FUN
New downtown store celebrates cocktail hour
Cocktail people are different from beer and wine people. Wine has a rarefied air about it, all noses and legs and terroir, and you need a guide, a sommelier who has spent years in training, to navigate the vintages and variations in horticulture — even then, most of you secretly know you can’t tell white from red in the dark. Beer culture has swung the other way — the most artisanal, farmhouse-sour, grapefruit-scented IPA is wearing a blue collar (or a plaid one, anyway) and is never more than a few dollars more than the most lowbrow ironic malt-in-a-can.
Cocktails, however, both embody the appreciation of fine liquors and liqueurs and embrace the joy of adulterating them with whatever weird ingredients your little heart desires. You can have zero taste to love cocktails or be a master mixologist with a flamethrower — it’s all fine. Some people display their identity with their bar drink of choice: Are you the kind of girl who orders a cosmo, the kind of man who wants a whiskey sour every evening; do you like your martinis shaken or stirred? Some of us sidle up to the bar with a signature drink like a laundry list (club soda, vodka, several limes and a handful of Luxardo cherries, please). Cocktails have a culture all their own, a fun, Thin Man/James Bond/Tiki torch/swizzle stick culture that can, if you’re inclined, turn the evening libation into a bit of a production.
More Spirited Goods, a new gift shop/boutique that opened its doors around Thanksgiving, is an entire emporium dedicated to the joy of cocktails and the celebration of that most wonderful of times, the cocktail hour. Located in the former Verve Gallery space at 219 E. Marcy St., More Spirited devotes itself to the careful curation of a collection that spans the gamut from the very highest to the very lowest of brows.
The collection is handpicked by the two owners, Liz Rees and Leon Morrison. Morrison moved to Santa Fe in 1998 after a career in retail, including the corporate arm of Neiman Marcus, and was a business consultant designing the retail spaces for hotels and resorts. Rees, originally from New York, has been coming to Santa Fe regularly for 30 years until she finally succumbed and moved here. She has a background in event management, running outdoor food markets in New York City. For Rees, the shop is an extension of an aspect of her home life.
“My partner at home is John Berlesconi [of local distillery KGB Spirits] who makes Taos Lightning Hacienda Gin, and I’m an amateur mixologist,” Rees says. “And I’ve always wanted to have a shop.”
“We came up with the idea that people who live in Santa Fe entertain at home,” Morrison says. “So this store has been created for those who enjoy entertaining at home and to celebrate the cocktail hour.”
The shop is part retail space, part gallery of delights, playing the cocktail-rich classic The Thin Man silently on a loop on its TV. The store sells a little bit of everything, except alcohol, encompassing both the high and more accessible ends of cocktail culture.
“We want anybody to be able to take something home if they want to,” Rees says.
This means a collection of kitschy flasks, cocktail napkins, bar towels and of course, a full set of barware, which is a signifier of truly extra nesting. The collection of cocktail shakers includes reproduction Prohibition-era shakers shaped like miniature fire extinguishers to vintage sterling silver shakers that very subtly let you know, with every sip, that you’ve “made it.” After all, if you’re going to use bespoke vodka, why not pour it out of a vintage Bohemian crystal decanter? And what hipster home bar would be complete without a louching set for absinthe?
The higher-end stuff also includes some notable showstoppers that prove that cocktails are as much about culture as they are about drinking. At More Spirited you can get, for example, a vintage ’60s clear Lucite bar cart, or a bar made out of the front end of a vintage Thai tuk-tuk (auto rickshaw).
“Liz has nice style and a refined point of view. I’m snarky and like ridiculous stuff,” says Morrison, who says he has trademarked the term “uberniers,” or uber-souvenirs, into which category falls a chessboard-turned-drinking game with flasks for pieces.
“We have new items that we source, and we also have a lot of vintage and antique items, one of a kinds,” Rees says. “We try to find things you couldn’t find easily in other places.”