St. Germain Here. St. Germain There. St. German Everywhere...

365 Days

St. Germain Here. St. Germain There. St. German Everywhere...

Posted 11/23/2008 at 09:52 PM by Cathy

Anyone tracking the wine scene in Boston lately will have noticed two trends.

The first: free wine and cocktails at anniversary parties around town. Ivy Restaurant's Cellar Clearing event, for example, and Radius restaurant's tenth anniversary fête. Wine. Cocktails. Food. Happy, happy crowds.

The second: St. Germain cocktails, in iterations far afield of its signature recipe of two shots Champagne, one and a half shots St. Germain liqueur, and two shots sparkling water.

At Radius' anniversary party, for example, bartenders mixed two cocktails all night long (in addition to pouring the Champagne, in addition to pouring the wine). And one of the cocktails featured St. Germain at its base, topped with gin, white cranberry juice, and sweet orange bitters. Its taste was so far from anything vaguely reminiscent of St. Germain that using the liqueur itself seemed practically superfluous.

Across town, at the just-opened Craigie on Main (formerly Craigie Street Bistro), it was the aptly-named Northern Lights cocktail that more closely echoed its main ingredient. Supplemented with Scotch, citrus, and Bitterman's Tiki Bitters, the team at Craigie more accurately captured what's beautiful about the St. Germain elderflower liqueur.

What's beautiful about it: mixed appropriately (with Scotch, say, instead of gin), St. Germain maintains its personality while adapting to a new environment of neighboring fluids.

What's beautiful about that: endless possibilities, on Main Street or downtown or wherever your imagination takes you.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.