The absolutely delicious Bolivian spirit all drinkers need to know
The absolutely delicious Bolivian spirit all drinkers need to know
By M. Carrie Allan Columnist, Food January 3
For director Steven Soderbergh, the bottle of singani — presented to him in 2007 by the Bolivian casting director for his movie “Che” — was the booze equivalent of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus.
Usually a vodka-rocks guy, Soderbergh started drinking and was smitten. He hunted down the giver with questions, “and he started giving me the narrative”: that singani has been made for hundreds of years, that it’s made from one particular grape and only in one particular area of Bolivia. “Which was intriguing, but at the time my main concern was, ‘Can you get me enough of this stuff to get me through the shoot?’ ”
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a clear answer to his question. At the time, “as it turned out, they didn’t export it.”
The drink that was a bolt from the blue for Soderbergh is no surprise to the millions of Bolivians who consider singani (sin-GAH-nee) virtually the national spirit. For Ramon Escobar, a U.S. foreign service officer whose family is Bolivian and who says he has been drinking it “since before I was supposed to,” singani is something special: a native Bolivian spirit whose success in the larger international market could make an enormous difference to the country it hails from.
“Every hectare of grapes that’s planted in Bolivia lifts a family out of extreme poverty,” says Escobar. “The grapes are grown by Bolivians, picked by Bolivians, fermented into wine by Bolivians, distilled into spirit by Bolivians. It’s bottled by Bolivians in bottles that are made by Bolivians, it’s labeled by Bolivians, it’s capped by Bolivians. . . . Quinoa, by comparison, when you export it, it’s one family that benefits at the lowest rung.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-absolutely-delicious-bolivian-spirit-all-drinkers-need-to-know/2016/01/03/376b5a44-af37-11e5-b820-eea4d64be2a1_story.html