A splash of inventiveness
Buenos Aires bars are creating cocktails using local ingredients – including vermouths infused with botanicals harvested from the Andes – and earning global recognition
With annual inflation running at over 200 per cent, and prices rising weekly, times are tough for Portenos – the residents of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
And yet the city’s cocktail bars are bustling with eager drinkers and buzzing with an inventiveness that is perhaps the only positive side effect of the country’s long-term economic distress.
Foreign exchange restrictions make it impractical to import classic cocktail ingredients, so the Argentinians have turned to making local versions instead, and producing new concoctions from their own wines, locally made spirits, and botanicals picked from Andean mountainsides.
The enduring, purely alcohol masterpieces on which Buenos Aires bartenders built their global reputations in the 1950s are all still available, as are the classic recipes brought in by Americans in exile from the Prohibition of the 20s.
But there is a growing movement towards new, lower-alcohol cocktails and a revival in the popularity of the vermouths imported by Italian and French immigrants a century ago, although completely reinvented and locally made.
A driving force in this revival has been Martin Auzmendi, cocktail history writer and co-founder of Buenos Aires Cocktail Week, and his partners.
Vermouth, once very important to Argentinian culture, had become a dad’s drink, Auzmendi says.
“It was for old people and for specific occasions like Sunday evening with the family having a barbecue at home.”
So Auzmendi and friends decided to make Argentina’s first local version. It took two years to find the right ingredients, using wine made from the flowery local Torrontes grape, produced in Mendoza, and infused with more than 30 mostly hand-picked herbs and botanicals from the Andes, with wine must replacing sugar.
The result, La Fuerza, has the characteristic herbal bite of vermouth, but with an extra flowery complexity. To launch the new product, the partners opened a bar, also named La Fuerza, in the up-and-coming Chacarita district, making it available in bottles and on tap.
The converted house with pavement tables and a rooftop terrace fills with young people who while away the evening with a bottle of vermouth and a siphon of sparkling mineral water, with ice and a slice of lemon or orange, accompanied by filling Italo-Spanish tapas.
Bar Notable is a status granted by city authorities to long-standing watering holes that have changed little and are seen as a part of the city’s cultural heritage. Such has been the success of the new vermouth, the owners have taken over La Roma, which opened in the Abasto district in 1927.
Its period charm includes a chequered floor, zinc bar counter, ancient wooden fridges, bottle-lined walls, and a portrait of independence leader Jose de San Martin. They have added an oven for Porteno-style pizza.
“In bars like this, they used to serve Fernet, vermouth, wine, aperitifs with soda – just a simple mix. We also have wine, beer, and simple cocktails.”
These include the Chacarita Spritz, which has Patagonian pear cider and sparkling water mixed with white vermouth, and the Pretty Supertonic, with gin, tonic water and a red La Fuerza that has gained a hint of vanilla from ageing in oak. The staff will make the classics, too, including negronis and martinis refreshed by the aromatic qualities of the new vermouths.
The Bar Notable system is just one indication that the city is serious about its cocktails, and some Portenos, such as star barman Ariel Figueroa at Doppelganger in San Telmo take a very hard line.
Doppelganger’s dimly lit woody interior has a comfortable atmosphere, like a library if laughing and chatting were permitted; instead of compulsory silence it has other rules.
“We don’t serve beer, wine, or coffee. We don’t sell soda or white wine. We only have cocktails,” he says.
The cocktail makers and the waiters are the same people, best able to describe a drink’s contents in detail.
“We have food, too,” Figueroa admits grudgingly, “but it’s to be mixed with cocktails.”
Customers are asked, “What kind of flavours do you want?” This also helps when working with locally made wines, vermouths, pisco, gin, and botanicals such as yerba mate, which produce distinctly Argentinian versions of even the best-known drinks.
The main menu of 150 cocktails does not even include classics such as a Tom Collins or Moscow Mule, but these are all available if ordered, and on a busy Friday or Saturday evening, as many as 500 different cocktails may be mixed. There are constant new creations, such as Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Bee, which includes rosewater, apricot brandy, cherry liqueur, Cointreau, Cocchi Americano, lemon juice and Jack Daniels.
“So much flavour,” Figueroa says. “People ask us, ‘How are you going to find a balance in this?’ But we do it all the time. Drop by drop.”
Of five South American bars listed in the World’s 50 Best Bars 2023, three are in Buenos Aires.
CoChinChina, in the hip Palermo Soho district, comes in at number 26 and, while sharing Doppelganger’s concerns for customer service, could otherwise scarcely be more different.
“We have a cocktail that has cilantro juice and coconut milk and sake,” bar manager Lucas Rothschild says. “But if you would like to have a beer, you have a beer.”
The multiroom venue has the style of a Vietnamese teahouse, and is hung with fish traps. An external counter sells readymixed cocktails to go, and the main interior bar is illuminated by a concoction of street signage looking as if it has been lifted from Saigon. For Portenos unable to afford an overseas holiday, this may be the next best thing.
There are both bar snacks and serious food, all with an Indochinese influence, one room serving a multicourse French menu with added Vietnamese umami flavours and cocktail pairings.
The bar’s version of a Manhattan involves two kinds of whiskey – bourbon, and Tennessee – and Scotch whisky.
“We make a mixture of dry vermouth and sweet vermouth and we add 15 per cent to 18 per cent of sesame oil by volume. Then we let it sit at room temperature for a couple of days,” Rothschild says.
The results are put in a freezer for two days until the oil freezes on the top and can be lifted off. Finished with a garnish of banana skin oil, it’s very smooth.
Despite the labour, this and many cocktails of equal invention come in at under US$5.
The best bar in Argentina, according to 50 Best Bars, and both No 11 in the world and No 1 for service in particular, is only a few blocks’ walk away.
Tres Monos’ decor is teenage goth bedroom with a touch of garage, but the clientele is a mix of ages, attracted in part by its early opening time, and extra seating under a canopy on the street.
“We make our own cider, we make our own sake, we make our own liquor,” manager Agostina Gerling says. “That started from an emergency because suddenly we didn’t have any Cointreau. So were we going to stop selling margaritas? No, we developed our own orange liqueur. The same with coffee liqueur, maraschino liqueur, and stuff like that.”
The main menu usually has eight or 10 cocktails on the fruitier, lighter side.
“We like people to try our drinks and we don’t want them to go home wasted,” Gerling says.
But there is always one that is more muscular, and they will make any of the classics you want.
One of the inventions in perpetual demand is El Milkie, whose ingredients include a clarified mix of Scotch whisky, ginger, lemon zest, cardamom and green tea, served with a slice of lemon. The result is like a whisky sour but with spicy and citrusy notes, and a smoky aftertaste.
Whisky is the only element not made in Argentina as yet. “We’re working on that,” Gerling says.
But if the economic situation has spurred inventiveness, it has also spurred caution, and people say that when you are going to spend this kind of money you had better be happy with the final product, Gerling says. So the bar gives customers the confidence to experiment.
“If you don’t like it, and you want to drink something else, we can change it. It’s no problem.”
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