TDC CALENDAR: JULY 2021
INSPIRATION 🇫🇷
It’s July, AKA Summer Holiday Season. And right in the middle, there’s Bastille Day. So what better than to take an imaginary vacation across the Channel?
We’re stepping away from the ubiquitous brash and busy ‘summer’ colour palette, towards something more sophisticated. More… French. We’ve taken inspiration from the our Gallic cousins to create an image that transports you straight to the Bordeaux countryside. Think long, hazy summer days, the cool retreat of a rustic farmhouse kitchen, and the weirdly welcome juiciness of red wine. But of course – there’s aTDC twist.
THE DRINK: ROUGE 🍷
Originally made for our World’s Most Experimental Bartender event, Rouge isn’t all that it appears to be. We first created the recipe in collaboration with Craig Grozier, researching the actual acids present in giving big red wine grapes their distinctive flavour.
Armed with this scientific knowledge, we set about creating a cocktail that mimicked all the qualities of red wine.:
37.5ml French Whisky (We’ve used Glann Ar Mor from Celtic Whisky Distillerie)
15 Aelder liqueur
6ml Malic acid solution
6ml Tartaric acid solution
.017g tannins
Perhaps unexpectedly, the boozy base of this cocktail is a light yet flavourful French whisky. To that, we add big fruit notes via Aelder liquer, Malic and Tartaric acids to mimic that wine tartness, and powdered tannins for an authentic red wine texture. To finish, the whole thing is flash infused with oak chips for a genuinely barrel-matured flavour.
“What is flash infusion?” we hear you ask. Simply put, you chuck everything in a cream whipper and charge it with gas. The pressure means you extract flavour from the ingredients faster – it forces the alcohol into the cell walls of the flavouring agents. When the bottle is then depressurised, the alcohol rushes back out again, and it carries those flavours with it. Magic.
HOW WE SHOT IT 📸
We built a wide scene filled with French foodie staples: freshly baked frangipane, brie, baguette. And the pièce de résistance, our “red wine”.
Within the studio setting we were able to create a soft light to replicate natural summer sunlight coming through a window. The pared back colour scheme and natural textures of linen and wood evoke the effortless sophistication of a rustic French dining table.