Allure of Cachaça Spreads to U.S. From Brazil

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/dining/09cachaca.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

The Pour
Allure of Cachaça Spreads to U.S. From Brazil
By SETH KUGEL

BARRA MANSA, Brazil

ABOUT 90 miles outside Rio de Janeiro, after the bikinis of Ipanema give way to shantytowns, industrial suburbs and finally green hills, a dozen empty 9,000-liter oak casks lie in a new cellar outside a 18th-century Portuguese colonial farmhouse surrounded by 1,500 acres of forest, pasture and sugar cane.

Antônio Rocha hopes those casks, when added to the 17 full ones in another cellar, will help satisfy the growing taste in the United States for wood-aged cachaça, a smoother, sippable version of the spirit his family has been making for four generations on the farm.

If people in the United States have ever tried cachaça — fermented and distilled sugar cane juice — it's probably when it has provided the punch for a caipirinha cocktail made with lime and sugar, mixed with a more heavy-handed mass-produced brand.

But at Mr. Rocha's farm, they chop sugar cane from their own fields, put it through a water-powered mill, ferment the juice with naturally occurring yeast and distill it using power generated by burning the leftover sugar cane pulp.

To age his 5-year-old cachaça, he uses cherry wood casks. His 12- and 25-year versions are aged in French oak. The casks in the warehouse are part of an expansion of the business.

For years, the family sold their cachaça to other bottlers around the state of Rio de Janeiro and didn't even use its own label, Rochinha, until 1990.

"Until 1990, cachaça didn't have any value," Mr. Rocha said. "The ones that sold were the ones that advertised; the quality ones didn't advertise. It was only by word of mouth."

Four years ago he began selling his 5- and 12-year-old cachaças in the United States, in liquor stores including Astor Place Wine & Spirits in lower Manhattan and by the shot at Churrascaria Plataforma in Midtown.

Aged cachaças, which usually have spent at least a year in wood casks, are only a tiny fraction of the overall cachaça market in the United States, maybe a thousand 9-liter cases a year, according to Olie Berlic, who imports Rochinha through Excalibur Enterprise in Greenwich, Conn. But demand is growing.

Imports of all cachaças (pronounced ka-SHA-sas) in the United States are way up in the last decade: 647,000 liters in 2007, compared with 213,000 liters in 2002 and fewer than 100,000 as late as 1998, according to the Brazilian government.

The two brands that dominate the market — Pitú and 51 — are mass produced and marked up at least five times over their retail prices in Brazil, where they cost little more than a bottle of water and get little respect.

Those sorts of industrial brands are made in large column stills, whereas small-batch brands use copper pot stills known as alambics.

Leblon, which came on the market in 2005 and is No. 3, is a purer, fruitier, more slickly marketed spirit, and has garnered good reviews. It and other labels vying for consumers in the United States, like Água Luca and Beleza Pura, can be consumed straight, but they are being marketed for making caipirinhas (pronounced kye-peer-EEN-yahs).

Meanwhile, tagging along for the ride are a few aged cachaças from small distillers like Rochinha, imbued with the flavors, and sometimes the colors, of the wood they are stored in.

Mr. Berlic, a former sommelier at Gotham Bar & Grill in Greenwich Village who created Beleza Pura, also imports most of them. In addition to Rochinha, there's GRM from the state of Minas Gerais, and Armazem Vieira from the southern state of Santa Catarina.

"You are seeing the infancy of a category," said Mr. Berlic, who traveled Brazil, tasting 800 cachaças, to choose his imports. "What cachaça can show the world is a variety of flavors that is unavailable in any other spirit."

He said at least 20 kinds of wood are being used for aging, including oak, which can add a toasty vanilla note, and native Brazilian trees like jequitibá rosa, which can imbue the drink with spicy notes like cinnamon.

And nearly all cachaças maintain a whiff of their sugar cane roots.

How far people in the United States have to go to enjoy the variety of cachaça becomes clear with a visit to the Academia da Cachaça, a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, where aged cachaças in the hundreds line the shelves and regulars carry a "cachaça notary" card that grants them special tasting privileges. There are 100 choices on the annotated menu, specifying the city and state of origin, the years of aging and the kind of wood they were aged in.

But Brazilians may not have that much of a head start on cachaça appreciation. Though cachaça has been around since the 1500s, it's had an up-and-down ride, and only in the last decade or so have high-end brands became popular.

"Brazil is no longer the only country in the world embarrassed about its distilled liquor," the Brazilian edition of Playboy said last April, when it ranked the top 20 cachaças.

(Two brands imported by Mr. Berlic's Excalibur Enterprise made the list: GRM at No. 19, and Armazem Vieira, from the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, at No. 8.)

Still, cachaça straight up seems to be a hard-to-acquire taste even for some Brazilians. At São Paulo's exclusive Skye bar, atop the $500-a-night Hotel Unique, with a view of the skyline so vast that it looks like Manhattan in a hall of mirrors, they use GRM to make the most expensive caipirinha in the house, costing 30 reais, or about $17. Purists might cringe, but for those who shy away from tasting liquor straight up, aged cachaça is an interesting variation.

In the United States, bars, restaurants and stores that want to offer a range of cachaças for sipping have been stymied because they can't get what they want.

Jean Frison, general manager of Churrascaria Plataforma, said he snaps up every kind he can find in New York; he has found 30. (Mr. Berlic said 40 are available nationwide, with 30 more on their way.)

At Plataforma, cachaça can cost as little as $5 for a shot of Pitú, to as much as $15 for GRM. Bottles range from about $12 for the industrial brands to $100 for the aged imports. At Astor Wine and Spirits, Beleza Pura is $24.99 a bottle and GRM 2-year is $69.99.

When Titus Ribas opened the Cachaça Jazz Club last year in Greenwich Village, he envisioned a epicurean cachaça shelf to show off the best of the artisanal cachaças from Minas Gerais state, which is a cachaça hotbed. Caught up in booking bands, though, he gave up and serves Pitú and Leblon.

Mr. Rocha and others, though, will keep trying to win people over to the taste of fine cachaça.

His family has been in the cachaça business since 1902, and he grew up steeped in it. "I didn't like television or video games or toys," he said. "For us, playing was taking apart a tractor."

He started drinking cachaça when he was about 13; even when he was studying mechanical engineering in Rio de Janeiro, he would come back weekends to work. He hopes to have an expanded business to pass on to a fifth generation, his son, Rodrigo, who was born on Jan. 18.

"We can't force him," Mr. Rocha said. "But I want to make him so proud of the brand, that he continues producing what we've done here for 106 years."