The aim was to make a pith-helmeted-like visit to older, neglected liquor stores—the sort of family-owned shops that perhaps were once prosperous and now do business mainly in pint-size flasks or liters of cheap wine or beer by the can. Inside, we’d scour the dark bottom shelves and dank back corners of the place, looking for forgotten bottles that had been languishing, perhaps for decades. That’s one of the special things about booze. Unlike just about every product in the world, distilled spirits almost never have to be rotated. More often than not, we turned up something rare or just plain strange. Our finds spanned the world: caraway-flavored kümmel from Germany, a wasabi-flavored schnapps, a brandy from Armenia called Ararat, a honey liqueur bottled with a real honeycomb.It became rather competitive for a while, and it was funny to find the sorts of strange spirits that had been earlier generations’ versions of flavored vodka. I thought I had taken a slight lead in the game when I discovered a sweet, peachy aperitif called Panache—with a hippie-ish, 1970s faux–Art Nouveau label—that was made by Domaine Chandon but now is impossible to find.
