A Wine that scores on its smell

Would you buy a bottle of booze just for its smell? That might seem unlikely until you take a sniff at Leblon, the new premium cachaça that’s trying  to spruce up Brazil’s explosive sugar cane spirit for the international market.

So this rather raffish liquor, Brazilian thurra really, has been put in a slick green tinged bottle, given a cool website, pumped with money for ads and events full of sexy young people, and put in duty free outlets, from where a friend flying back from Rio got me a bottle.

But forget the packaging; where Leblon really scores is in the smell. Cachaça always smells good; it’s a concentration of the heady, sweet, slightly rancid smell you get as ganna is crushed in front of you for ras. Leblon takes this smell and raises it to the power of awesome. It is the smell of slow cooking syrup, a heavy, enveloping sweetness that caresses your nasal cells with its richness, buttery and slightly lemony aroma, and the aroma of an expensive sweet shop with a brewery two blocks away that occasionally sends in a whiff of something altogether more wickedly.

This Leblon bottle was my first experience of the premium cachaça that Brazil is now eagerly peddling. I’ve been a cachaça addict since I tasted my first caipirinha, the cocktail that cachaça is best known for, made with muddled limes and sugar. It sounds like a mojito, but where those are always either syrupy or medicinal, a caipirinha is altogether different and the reason is cachaça . Rum is made from molasses, the leavings of boiled sugar cane juice after sugar is crystallised out, and that gives it a cooked, more rounded, smooth taste. Cachaça is made from the fresh sugar cane juice fermented straight off, and it has rawness, a vicious bite that is paradoxically both its limitation and its greatest strength.

In fact, to be honest, despite that great smell, cachaça is pretty awful to drink neat. The 40% alcohol numbs your lips and leaves you unprepared for some nasty bitter notes, like all the less pleasant off-tastes in ganne-ka-ras concentrated. And that’s before you start choking when the alcohol hits your throat. Pitú , the most commonly available brand, is almost an industrial spirit. Canario, the other brand I had at home, is double distilled in pot stills, which makes it a bit better, but not much.

With Leblon you can see the Brazilians are grappling with their equivalent of the spicing problem of Indian food: how do you tame it enough to make it acceptable to a foreign audience, without losing the essential character that makes it interesting in the first place. Apparently there are really interesting cachaças like Anisio Santiago and Maria da Cruz, which are rarely available outside Brazil. Leblon is just the best marketed, and at around $25 a bottle is fairly good value. Though I’d still not recommend drinking it neat — its more rounded and cognac like (no surprise, since its made by a French trained distiller , and aged in old cognac barrels), but you still get that nasty kick. (By contrast, tequila, with which cachaça is sometimes wrongly compared, is actually quite nice to drink neat).

So let’s leave drinking cachaça neat to the Brazilians, and put it to the use it was really meant for. Because when you cut up limes (the greener the better), add some confectioners sugar (the one with smaller crystals, so it melts fast) and mash them together, the idea being to get as much of the oil in the lime’s skins as possible, and then add ice and cachaça , incredible magic happens. I think caipirinhas work so well because limes are fairly strong stuff themselves, who’s overpowering acrid notes can drown out other flavours unless they are balanced by something equally strong.

And in the cachaça they have met their perfect match. Acrid lime bite and cachaça kick balance each other, leaving a drink that is wonderfully sweet-sour, refreshing and clean to the taste. Making it with Leblon added amazing citrusy notes, and a lovely open-mouth feel. This is one to beg friends to bring home — at least until some smart guy finds a way to make it from all that ganne ka ras we have around the corner...