Aguardiente de Pisco

Aguardiente de Pisco, a grape brandy distilled in several Pacific Coast valleys of Andean South America. Made from grapes of quality too poor for wine, the brandy was developed by seventeenth-century planters. Distillation resulted in a clear brandy with a sweetish flavor and strong aftertaste, which, along with its alcohol content, made it a popular beverage for festive occasions. It combined well with fruits, and lime quickly became the favorite. Historians are uncertain why the brandy was labeled pisco. Local legend holds that Pisco Valley (Peru) landowners turned to distillation of grapes for brandy because they failed at making wine, thus giving aguardiente de Pisco a lead for brand recognition. For a time wine and brandy were both made in the Pisco region, but after Chilean wines captured foreign markets in the early nineteenth century, vineyard owners turned solely to brandy. Thereafter distilling aguardiente de Pisco moved to the upriver Pisco plantations, where cotton cultivation did not prevail. Shipped on muleback in teardrop-shaped clay casks, corked at the spherical end, it soon reached markets throughout Peru. Many travelers remarked favorably on the drink, and numerous popular legends arose regarding the proper way to imbibe it and its aftereffects. Pisco has become an item in the tourist trade and the foreign market only to the degree that the "pisco sour," a frothy blend of pisco, egg white, lime juice, and salt, has achieved popularity as an exotic drink.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nicholas P. Cushner, Lord of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600–1767 (1980), pp. 126-128.

Vincent Peloso, "Succulence and Sustenance: Region, Class, and Diet in Nineteenth-Century Peru," in Food, Politics, and Society in Latin America, edited by John C. Super and Thomas C. Wright (1985), pp. 45-64.

Additional Bibliography

Brown, Kendall W. Bourbons and Brandy: Imperial Reform in Eighteenth-Century Arequipa. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.

Gutiérrez, Gonzalo. El pisco: apuntes para la defensa internacional de la denominación de origen peruana. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2003.

Rice, Prudence M. "Wine and Brandy Production in Colonial Peru: A Historical and Archaeological Investigation (in Research Note)." Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 27, No. 3. (Winter, 1997): 455-479.

                                     Vincent Peloso