Having spent months reading about how Lillet Blanc served over ice is the perfect summer drink, I finally picked up a bottle several weeks ago. (I’ve always been a procrastinator.) As much as I liked the floral, citrusy flavor of the fortified wine, it turned out to be too sweet for me to drink straight, even when topped off with sparkling water. I figured I could always use it in cocktails, but I was curious about another bottle I’d seen on the shelf next to the Lillet: Cocchi Americano, an Italian aperitif wine that I’d heard was similar to Lillet.
I mixed up two half-size cocktails (a total of two ounces each), one with Lillet Blanc and one with Cocchi Americano. I usually like tart cocktails, but these were a little too sour even for me. (I was careful to measure out all the ingredients exactly, so I don’t know what went wrong, but I had the same experience with a previous attempt to make the cocktail.) The one with Lillet was all but undrinkable, so I added a touch more orange liqueur to each and a few more drops of absinthe, which I’d used a little too sparingly.
I wasn’t looking for a fall cocktail when I began testing these two—I thought that both of my experiments would be more summery—but I ended up finding one in the 20th Century Cocktail (especially when made with Cocchi Americano). It starts out light and bright enough for the latest Indian summer days, but then transforms into something dark and complex enough for blustery, cold fall evenings.
1.5 oz gin
.75 oz Cocchi Americano (or Lillet)
.5 oz creme de cacao (if you’re using commercial creme de cacao, you may want to increase this to .75 oz)
.5 oz lemon juice
