Every year, Ivy Mix holds out hope that Pisco’s moment has finally arrived, that this is the year that we’ll finally experience a “Summer of Pisco.” And year after year, she’s disappointed.
Mix, who co-owns pan-Latin cocktail bar Leyenda in Brooklyn and literally wrote the book on Latin American spirits, has long championed the Peruvian grape distillate both as a versatile cocktail component and as a neat sipping spirit, and for good reason. Peruvian Pisco in particular — and for the purposes of this story the term “Pisco” will refer to Peruvian Pisco rather than the Chilean distillate of the same name — in theory ticks a lot of boxes for both bartenders and spirits enthusiasts.
It’s clear. It’s distilled from naturally fermented grapes. It comes in a variety of expressions, with flavor profiles ranging from earthy and round to floral and citrusy. It has a rich history and is tied by common origin to one of the world’s most ascendant cuisines. And it’s strictly additive-free, with regulations prohibiting even the addition of water during the production process.
But Mix’s enthusiasm for Pisco — an enthusiasm shared by many in the industry — hasn’t exactly proved contagious with her patrons. “I put a Pisco flight on the menu for a while,” she says. “I think we sold, like, two.”
For Mix, Pisco’s inability to gain traction in the U.S. isn’t just disappointing, but perplexing. On paper, an additive-free spirit craft-distilled from quality wine by mostly small, independent producers should play well in an expertly curated Brooklyn cocktail bar like Leyenda, particularly as consumers gravitate toward products they perceive as pure, artisanal, and authentic. If once-niche liquids like mezcal and amaro can find their places on the mainstream back bar, then why isn’t there room for Pisco?
32,000 Pisco Sours and Counting
It wasn’t always like this. During the 19th century a good deal of Pisco made its way up the western shoreline of the Americas as the discovery of gold and silver deposits brought fortune seekers and wealth to settlements up and down the Pacific Coast. The Bank Exchange Saloon in San Francisco inscribed the word “Pisco” into the classic cocktail canon with the invention of the Pisco Punch, a popular drink crafted from a secret recipe that may or may not have included cocaine.
But Pisco’s popularity in the U.S. couldn’t survive the various economic shocks of the latter 19th century nor the passing of the 18th Amendment. Shorter smuggling routes from Mexico and the Caribbean put more tequila and rum into American’s hands during its decade of Prohibition, and Americans’ preference for those spirits (as well as whiskey) persisted after repeal. The Pisco Sour landed in the U.S. just as a once-robust demand for Peru’s national spirit bottomed.
Sources dispute the precise origins of the Pisco Sour, but American expat Victor Morris, whose namesake Morris’s Bar opened in Lima in 1916, generally gets credit for the cocktail’s global renown. A classic sour construction of spirit, sugar, and citrus, the Pisco Sour also calls for a foamy head of egg white stained with a few dashes of Angostura bitters. In a modern context, it’s exactly the kind of slightly complicated cocktail consumers will more likely order at a bar than make at home, and that’s assuming they can find a bar that serves one.
For the category, the Pisco Sour is a mixed blessing. On one hand, the spirit has its own globally recognized hero cocktail that calls for Pisco by name. On the other, the drinking public — at least in the U.S. — associates the entire category with a singular, somewhat esoteric drink.
“When I worked at Violet Hour back in 2007 we had maybe seven Piscos on the menu, which was probably more than any other bar in the States at the time. Fast-forward and there are a couple dozen more Piscos on the market in the U.S. But it’s still kind of locked into this idea of ‘Pisco equals Pisco Sour and Pisco Sour equals Pisco.’”
“For years Pisco has been trapped in the Pisco Sour,” says Ian Leggett, co-founder of SUYO Pisco, a four-year-old brand Leggett founded alongside partner Alex Hildebrandt to bring small-batch, single-origin Pisco to the United States and other global export markets. Of the 500-plus Pisco-producing bodegas in Peru, Leggett estimates that he and Hildebrandt have met with roughly 100 in search of Piscos that exhibit the nuance and range the spirit can coax from the eight grapes permitted for use by the D.O.
SUYO is one of a handful of newer Pisco brands that aim to change the conversation around Pisco. But while consumers do have access to more and better Pisco than they did just a few years ago, the conversation remains largely the same.
“When I worked at Violet Hour back in 2007 we had maybe seven Piscos on the menu, which was probably more than any other bar in the States at the time,” says Mike Ryan, global beverage director for Acurio International, the restaurant group founded by celebrated Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio. “Fast-forward and there are a couple dozen more Piscos on the market in the U.S. But it’s still kind of locked into this idea of ‘Pisco equals Pisco Sour and Pisco Sour equals Pisco.’”
Across Ryan’s portfolio — which includes U.S. outposts of Acurio’s ceviche restaurant La Mar in San Francisco, Miami, and Washington State — a full 90 percent of Pisco sales by volume end up in some variation of the Pisco Sour. “Our No. 1-selling item everywhere — food item or beverage item — is the Pisco Sour,” he says. “In [La Mar] San Francisco, for instance, year-to-date we’ve sold about 32,000 Pisco Sours.”
Like Mix, Ryan is hopeful that consumer education — that holy grail of all drinks marketing — can help extricate Pisco from the confines of its most popular use case. Alongside all those sours, Ryan and his staff work to put Pisco’s best foot forward in a variety of other cocktails. Some, like the Manhattan-esque El Capitán or the Chilcano — a refreshing mix of Pisco and ginger ale or ginger beer that long predates the Moscow Mule — are pillars of the Pisco canon in Peru. Given that a few bottles can provide bartenders with a palette ranging from herbal and earthy to citrusy and floral, the spirit also slots seamlessly into a variety of classic cocktail formats: Pisco Negronis, Pisco Palomas, Pisco and Tonics, Piscopolitans, etc.
“In all of our restaurants, we have a house version of our Espresso Martini made with Pisco,” Ryan says. “And every time we are able to get somebody to enjoy a Pisco like this, outside of the standard Pisco Sour, I feel like it helps sort of push the agenda forward a little bit.”
‘Barriers Everywhere’
Ask a producer what’s holding Pisco back in major export markets like the United States, however, and consumer education takes a backseat to several more immediate, structural economic issues. For one, like other grape-based brandies, Pisco has a season. Where whiskey or rum makers can rely on vast troves of grain or sugar that will keep in storage year round, Pisco producers can only distill for a few weeks during the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn (typically in March/April), leaving them particularly exposed when there’s a bad grape harvest.
The tax structure in Peru also disincentivizes Pisco production, leaving small, often family-run vineyards and bodegas to distill more out of a sense of tradition and as a labor of love. Even as the Peruvian government promotes Pisco abroad, at home distillates are subject to a hefty 18 percent tax from which many agricultural products are exempt. In other words, fermented and distilled grapes incur a tax penalty that table grapes do not, hurting the value proposition for Pisco production. This same math means that other agricultural products — and Peru is a major exporter of all sorts of produce, from asparagus to blueberries to avocados to, yes, table grapes — also provide a greater value proposition to farmers, a reality that has squeezed Peruvian viticulture in recent years.
Meanwhile, anti-smuggling regulations instituted as part of the U.S. war on drugs require additional screening of shipping containers arriving from certain Latin American ports of origin, including those in Peru. The cost of that additional screening is passed along to shippers and eventually to the end consumer, further nudging up the price of Pisco exported to the U.S.
“There are barriers everywhere,” says Kami Kenna, a partner at Pisco brand PiscoLogía who also works in agave education and distillation in Oaxaca, Mexico. “It’s hard to work in Mexico, but it’s significantly harder to work in Peru.”
Whereas spirits like tequila and mezcal flow fairly easily and inexpensively by truck across the southern U.S. border thanks to commercial agreements between the two major trading partners, exporting Pisco to markets in the U.S. or Europe involves a container ship, a good deal of paperwork, and a lot of expense. That’s triggered a race to the bottom on price in those markets, Kenna says. As a result, quality Piscos often cost too much to feasibly feature in a menu cocktail, and those inexpensive enough for the well often aren’t of a quality that is likely to change anyone’s mind.
“You see this generation wanting to go to places and try ancestral spirits and really place themselves into a community. They’re getting first- hand exposure. But that happened a lot more easily for mezcal, right?”
“With PiscoLogía we’re working toward bridging the gap, we have one expression, maybe two, that can go into cocktails based on price alone,” Kenna says. “But as soon as we adjust the price, it gets dropped. That’s pretty frustrating.”
Pisco’s Quiet Moment
While one could blame neoliberal global trade regimes or the war on drugs or Peruvian tax policy for Pisco’s inability to catch fire in the U.S., the spirit is quietly having something of a moment. Pisco exports experienced a volume dip in 2020 due to the pandemic and another tiny step back in 2023 along with many other segments of the global spirits industry. But even accounting for those setbacks, overall Pisco exports increased at a compound annual growth rate of 9 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to Peru’s Ministry of Production, netting $9.2 million for the industry last year. Roughly a third of those exports ended up in the U.S.
As bar director for NYC Peruvian restaurants Llama Inn and Llama San from 2015 until 2022, award-winning bartender and consultant Lynnette Marrero created a Pisco-focused beverage program at a time when few other restaurants or bars in the city had even a single expression on the back bar and access to brands was limited. She believes Pisco’s modest uptick both in U.S. sales and availability is at least in part a reflection of Peru’s rising status as both a gastronomic hub and a travel destination.
“I do think part of it is just travel and exposure,” she says. “You see this generation wanting to go to places and try ancestral spirits and really place themselves into a community. They’re getting first-hand exposure. But that happened a lot more easily for mezcal, right?”
Speaking of Pisco’s elusive “moment” almost inevitably leads to comparisons with the stratospheric rise of tequila and — more modestly — mezcal, despite the analogy being imperfect. Shared geography and longstanding trade ties facilitated an organic cultural exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that introduced tequila to Americans and helped fuel its growth in the U.S. With tequila leading the way, it was a short leap over to other agave spirits for many bar professionals, and mezcal soon became a darling of the community (with raicilla now awaiting its turn).
Peru doesn’t share that proximity to the U.S., nor is it likely to supplant Mexico as Americans’ preferred destination for quick, boozy beach getaways. But as more U.S. travelers make gastronomic pilgrimages to sample Peru’s world-beating cuisine, it’s reasonable to believe Pisco could experience a boost in profile as well. For the category, one looming question is whether a brief flirtation with Pisco can turn into a budding romance. After all, one of its greatest assets — a diversity of flavor profiles — can also prove a liability when it comes to winning new converts.
“When someone goes to a Latin American restaurant, they’re already buying into the idea that they may not know everything about the cuisine, and they’re a little more trusting.”
“If we zero in on tequila, we’re talking about one type of agave mostly from two different growing regions and essentially two production processes,” PiscoLogía’s Kenna says. “But even if we get away from all the additives, we still find all this variation in all of these tequila brands.” Pisco, by comparison, comes from eight different grapes grown in five different growing regions, each containing its own unique set of elevation changes and microclimates. Any one of those grapes can express a range of characteristics depending on its origin. “And then there’s eight grapes, and then there’s blends of grapes — there are just so many levels,” Kenna says.
That’s a blessing for spirits geeks and cocktail creators but a potential stumbling block for consumers who broadly know what to expect from their agave spirits but don’t know what to make of words like “acholado” — a blended Pisco made from multiple grape varieties — or grapes like Uvina or Mollar (two of Peru’s less planted varieties).
That’s led some newer brands to simplify the way they present Pisco in export markets. SUYO’s core lineup features just two expressions, both single-variety “Pisco puros”: a non-aromatic Quebranta and an aromatic Italia. By simplifying their offerings, they hope to make it easier to bring new consumers on board. “We’re still trying to establish Pisco [in consumers’ minds] as one grape, one varietal, and then move on from there” Leggett says.
PiscoLogía likewise offers a core range duo including a single-varietal Quebranta — largely considered the workhorse grape of the Pisco universe — and an acholado that blends Quebranta with the more floral Italia.
Ultimately, Marrero says, Pisco needs a push from outside of the Peruvian gastronomic diaspora. “When someone goes to a Latin American restaurant, they’re already buying into the idea that they may not know everything about the cuisine, and they’re a little more trusting,” she says. But getting consumers to walk into a cocktail bar or restaurant that’s decidedly not Peruvian and ask for a Chilcano? That’s a heavier lift.
“When there are people who are not Peruvians talking about Pisco, ” Leggett says, “that’s when it’s going to become a thing.”
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