Pisco Sour Blues

It was no surprise to me to learn that one of President Boric’s senior homeland security officials, the Undersecretary of the Interior, has found himself in deep trouble after a secretive tryst with one of his female subordinates.

Why am I not surprised? Because apparently the Undersecretary (Subsecretario), before committing his indiscretion, was heavily lubricated with several pisco sours. One thing I have learned from over five decades of close familiarity with Chile, Chileans, and all things Chilean, is that the pisco sour, Chile’s national cocktail, while a true pleasure, is actually a very dangerous one. And, the “Catedral” version of the pisco sour is by far the most sinister.

In 2010, I had an urge to describe my relationship and historical encounters with the pisco sour, so I posted on this blog The Last Pisco Sour. Readers should peruse that post prior to reading the rest of this one. But in the light of the scandal surrounding the Subsecretario, and after reading a short Dia a Dia piece by B.B. Cooper in El Mercurio, feel obliged to add a couple of my own pisco sour experiences to his, and by so doing, provide further proof that the pisco sour comes with innate wickedness and thus, must be handled with great care.

 B.B. Cooper suggests, as a result of his own experience, added to that of the Subsecretario, that a pisco sour, especially the Catedral version, should probably carry one of Chile’s now common black, rectangular-shaped health labels. He suggests that a clear warning that the pisco sour is “High in Libido” would be appropriate. This because both Cooper’s and the Subsecretario’s pisco sours led them into fateful, wrongful liaisons. I get Cooper’s desire to alert potential drinkers to the dangers of pisco sours, but I’m pretty sure a warning like that would not discourage its use, but could rather be an enticement to imbibe even more.

When I was living in Chile in the late 1960s, as a young Peace Corps Volunteer, I was introduced to the pisco sour when visiting Chilean homes. One or two small sours were often served before a meal, mostly on special occasions, surely before Sunday family lunches. Warned to take only one, maybe two, we “gringos” would often take more, because they are simply amazingly tasty, and we were trying to fit in. We found the immediate buzz of a pisco sour to be almost spiritual, it was liberating, exaggerating your personality. If you were friendly but reserved, you became more gregarious. If you were funny, you became funnier. But, if you were a jerk, you became a bigger jerk, which could lead to uncontrollable, uninhibited performances ending in embarrassment and an early exit to “walk it off, get some air, go home!”

We had to learn to drink pisco sours,  so we tried to do so over and over again. I observed early that many Chileans, especially women, would unhesitatingly accept the first pisco sour, but never let their glass get below half full. If your glass was empty, you immediately had another thrust into your hand by watchful, and I now believe devious, maids or hired servers. They would watch us closely from afar, then giggle and murmur to themselves as some of us, their victims, myself once or twice included, began to laugh louder, speak our imperfect Spanish even more imperfectly, and yes, be more socially clumsy than normal. But therein hides the dilemma; how do you keep your glass of pisco sour half full? Ours always tended too rapidly towards empty; gravity the culprit? I haven’t really figured that one out, to this day, but I admit, I haven’t really tried.

One night in those late 1960’s, after a night on the town, probably at the Rincon Aleman, a wonderful bar on Calle Merced, just a block from the then U.S. Consulate, I arrived with my roommates at our apartment with the felt need for a couple more drinks. At that time, we drank pisco sours but did not usually make them. We drank mostly beer, wine, or Piscolas (Pisco and Coca Cola, a “Chile Libre”, so to speak). But that night I offered the guys pisco sours, and went into the dark kitchen to make some. The lights were out, a common occurrence in the late 1960s in Santiago, so it was dark, just some ambient light coming in from the outside through the small windows above the counter. Anyway, I knew where everything was in that very small kitchen, so all I had to do was find some lemons, sugar and the pisco bottle, which I did, right away, and make a big pitcher of pisco sours that my friends and I drank in happy oblivion, down to the last drop.

The next day, my wife, Ximena, and I had planned to prepare lunch at the apartment for her parents, to introduce them to some of our friends and reciprocate for the many fine meals we had at their home. I watched Ximena go into the kitchen to prepare our lunch, but when she quickly returned with a strange look on her face, I could tell something was about to go bad. “Dave, where is the bottle of vinegar I had in the kitchen for today’s salad? All I find is a full bottle of pisco!” 

Since then, my group of friends from those Chile days and I have honed our pisco sour making skills. We meet every couple of years for a few days to reminisce about our days in the Peace Corps. One lasting tradition in these reunions, along with Ximena’s empanadas de pino, is the production of pisco sours. Over the years we have pretty much settled on the “right” recipe: two thirds pisco (a good one like Alto del Carmen, or Mistral, 40%), one third sutil lemon juice, a chorro (splash) of goma (simple sugar), and a bit of raw egg white. All into the blender with enough ice to make it nice and cool as well as a bit more diluted. The task has ultimately settled on John (from Will John Get His Groove Back fame), who claims some sort of special skill at putting the ice in the blender and turning it on, so we have come to rely on him and his special pisco sour blending skills.

As the details of what is now a criminal case against the Undersecretary and his night on the town become known, it seems he and his victim (I think that’s the right term) actually consumed about eight Catedral-size pisco sours. If that is true, it is certainly possible that neither of the two main personalities in this sordid affair remember much from that night. He at first presented the possibility that he might have been drugged by enemies to reveal national security information he surely holds, given his position. And she was a bit slow to reveal what she had been through and how she felt about it all, which, by the way, is common in traumatic cases such as this one appears to be. But taxi drivers, security cameras, onlookers, and refreshed memories are piecing together the actions of the Subsecretario (now ex-Subsecretario, by the way). He is now in preventive detention, expecting a charge of sexual abuse and rape, maybe kidnapping also, and the entire case gets more scandalous by the day.

The eight pisco sours and the Undersecretary’s downfall brought to mind a recent encounter of my own with pisco sours, and the Catedral size was a prime factor also. In my case, I was very legitimately with my wife and Liliana, Osvaldo, and David, an Argentine family who are very good friends and with whom we have traveled quite extensively over the years. We were not at the Peruvian Aji Seco Mistico where the Undersecretary over imbibed, but rather at the seafood restaurant of Coco Pacheco, Aqui Esta Coco, but we did have two rounds of pisco sours, of course Catedral size and strength.

There are few similarities between what happened to me and what happened to the Undersecretary. I stopped at two sours, but I probably should have stopped at only one. After a wonderful lunch of machas and ostiones a la parmesana and chupe de locos, we went straight home. As the others relaxed and enjoyed the late afternoon cityscape of Santiago from our balcony, I went to bed. I had begun to suffer what Chileans call a “pataleta“, probably hepatic or renal or both.

Two days later I was OK, which also makes my pisco sour case much different than the Undersecretary’s fateful encounter with the pisco sour. He ended up in preventive detention waiting to be charged. He may never see a night out with pisco sours again, while I am free to again ignore the warnings and enjoy one or two of these lovely Chilean cocktails.

Salud!

Posted in Leesburg, Virginia, on November 25, 2024

David Joslyn

David Joslyn, after a 45-year career in international development with USAID, Peace Corps, The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and private sector consulting firms, divides his time between his homes in Virginia and Chile. Since 2010, David has been writing about Chile and Chileans, often based upon his experience with the Peace Corps in Chile and his many travels throughout the country with family and friends.