We’re being asked about pisco a lot at the moment.
Nick Gillett has written a piece for Harpers on pisco and the wider South American category. He puts the rediscovery down to food and travel more than to any single marketing push, with bartenders coming back to serves that have been on menus for 150 years. International investment is now landing in distilleries that were small and family run, though he’s clear that logistics and bureaucracy out of the region are still real friction for producers.
He reads the drinker data as a venue story more than a generational one. It’s skewed by where pisco gets poured, in better cocktail bars and ambitious restaurants.
His concern for the category is its dependence on one drink. He’d park the Peru versus Chile terroir argument and win the menu battle first, with a wider range of serves that work across different occasions and doesn’t expect pisco to rival tequila and doesn’t think it needs to.
Nick sees the same opening for cachaça and for Fernet-Branca, a category Mangrove will be putting real energy behind. The UK is only the tenth largest export market for pisco. He puts that gap with suppliers and importers, since the bartenders already know the serves.
