Zwack! Or, How I Almost Invented a Cocktail

Stepping off the office elevator one morning, a colleague and I found ourselves face to face with a young project manager with whom we occasionally worked.  “Would you like some Zwack?” she asked cheerfully.  As if in a bad sitcom, the colleague and I looked at one another, then back at the PM and said, in unison, “What?!”  The PM reached into her bag and pulled out a squat, spherical bottle.  “Zwack,” she said.  “It's Hungarian,” she elucidated after an awkward moment or two.  The label did indeed read “Z-W-A-C-K,” with a symmetrical, Swiss-looking cross underneath.  The story apparently was that PM's husband, a former U.S. army soldier, used to participate in joint exercises with the militaries of various NATO countries, particularly Hungary.  Ever since, his army buddies have been bringing back beverages native to whatever country they happened to visit.  “Are you really giving it away?” I asked skeptically.  “Yes,” she assured me, “we have a ton of it at home.  There is no way we could go through all of it.”  I had no idea what the company policy was regarding accepting offers of free booze, but being reasonably sure that it was being offered in good faith and with no expectation of any return favors, I took it.

The PM's heartfelt assurance that the stuff was not available in the US was proven false after a single glance at the back label (“Imported by Diageo North America, Inc., Norwalk, CT”), but that made it no less interesting.  Zwack is a liqueur made with a proprietary blend of herbs and spices, in the manner of Italian amari, the original recipe dating back to the late 1700s.  Medium amber in color, it has a nose of citrus, especially orange, as well as gingerbread and molasses.  The herbs are evident, but muted.  On the palate, it is more sweet than bitter, with flavors of orange, a hint of tea, and a medicinal quality not unlike that of Benedectine, but more subtle.  It is as if Cointreau and Chartreuse has a love child who turned out to be an introvert.  Now I had a bottle of the stuff.  But what to do with it?  Hungarians reportedly drink shots of ice-cold Zwack, but to me it had "cocktail" written all over it.

Rewind a couple of years and two thousand miles or so due west.  On a visit to Oregon, I had discovered Rogue's Pink Spruce – a locally made gin aged in Pinot Noir barrels.  A bar in Portland made it into a convincing Aviation Cocktail for me, and knowing I could not get it back home, I brought back a bottle.  The problem was that it proved not to be interchangeable with a traditional English gin in most contexts.  With a nose that was musty and not particularly fresh and a sharp burn of alcohol on the front palate, it was both more assertive and less refined than the gins I was used to, though with careful tasting, I detected some cucumber and spice on the finish.  The key difference, though, was that it was sweeter than any other gin I've ever tasted, Portland's own famously sweet and floral Aviation included.  Somewhat disappointed, I shoved the bottle into the back of a cabinet.

Although my embrace of the nouveau-cocktail culture has been slow and skeptical (let's face it, I'm just too old to hang with the faux-speakeasy kids), thanks to a couple of places in Asheville and Philadelphia I have grown fond of the Martinez, a mix of gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino and orange bitters that may or may not have been the predecessor of the modern martini.  Its main challenge, however, is that it calls for Old Tom gin, a relatively sweet precursor to the modern English gin, which only the most dedicated of home mixologists would keep on hand.  Could the Pink Spruce be an effective stand-in?  The answer proved to be a qualified yes.  After a few experiments with proportions, I had a reasonable facsimile.  But why not keep going?  Could Zwack's pronounced citrus flavors work synergistically with the bitters to mask the dank basement quality of the Pink Spruce?  This time, the yes was far more resounding, if I say so myself.  What I ended up with, though not that similar to the original Martinez any longer, was balanced, not too sweet, light-bodied enough not to coat the tongue but with enough layered depth to keep you focused and prevent you from drinking too many too quickly (Pink Spruce clocks in at 90 proof, after all).  I am still trying to come up with a good name.  My working name, in a nod to the Corpse Reviver, is Rosemont #2 (#1 still being under development), though if someone has something Hungarian-sounding to offer, I'd love to hear about it.

Rosemont #2
2 oz. Rogue Pink Spruce or Old Tom gin
¾ oz. sweet vermouth, preferably Dolin
¾ oz. Zwack
Generous dash of orange bitters

Fill a cocktail shaker half-way with ice.  Add the ingredients and stir vigorously for 30 seconds.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a swath of orange peel.

Complexity vs. Simplciity

An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It
Bruce Scheiman

Capsule Review

In An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It (Alpha, 2009), Bruce Scheiman makes the claim that religion offers the best means of understanding one's place in the world regardless of whether God exists.  Specifically, in his view it offers more than a purely materialist, science-based approach ever could.  He offers many interrelated arguments to support his claims.  Unfortunately, I do not have the time to dissect Scheiman's ideas in detail, but, after the majority of his edifice eventually collapses under the barrage of questions with which any thoughtful reader would inevitably bombard it, one question remains standing that we must consider.

Scientific materialism is reductionist – it holds that complex natural phenomena can always be reduced to a collection simpler ones.  Thus, any biological process is a collection of chemical ones, and a chemical process is a combination of physical ones.  In other words, biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics.  And we all know that left to their own devices, physical processes will always move towards greater entropy, i.e. a lack of order.  So physics will always move away from greater complexity towards greater simplicity.  Yet few of us would deny that life, over the millions of years of its existence, has evolved towards greater complexity.  From RNA to DNA, from single-cell organisms to multi-cell ones, and eventually towards consciousness and intelligence.  How do we reconcile this glaring contradiction?

Scheiman says that only religion can do this.  This, though deeply appealing to a vast majority of people (he is right about that), is, of course, false.  Thomas Nagel, for one, has offered the idea of natural teleology that is compatible with a fully non-theistic view of the world.  His ideas, which, though fascinating, are a subject for another day, may yet end up being, if you will allow me, reduced to scientific materialism as we understand it today.  Still, the question of how to reconcile the physical imperative of greater simplicity with life's inexorable march towards greater complexity is something those of us who use science to guide important life decisions must examine seriously.