I have the biggest of first world problems; I have too much booze and not enough storage.

My cocktail hobby started off simply enough, with a handful of staples and a number of bottles of good scotch. The situation escalated quickly though. Your average bottle of cordial or liqueur doesn’t tend to tend to be all that expensive, and each bottle unlocks more and more cocktails to try. It’s like a tech tree, in all the best and worst ways. Once you’ve unlocked a new technology, there’s no going back, and thus my bottle collection has become a grow only entity, slowly spreading from cabinet to cabinet. It doesn’t help that once cocktails are your hobby, every holiday comes with a fresh new assortment of lovely libations to experiment with.

Again; first world problems.

For a variety of reasons I’ve decided to fight the good fight and pare down my collection, or at the very least, make sure that every bottle earns its keep and is worthy of its shelf space. To that end, I’ve been working to try every bottle I have, and either find fabulous uses for it and add it to library, enjoy what I have and say goodbye, or pour it down the drain and save my alcohol budget for better spirits.

To that end my current subject of exploration is creme de cassis. This bottle falls afoul of two of the rough rules I’ve created for this project: 1) it’s a bottle I haven’t used in at least a year and 2) I have multiple bottles of it. Having a bottle that never gets used is bad enough, but having two unused bottles is ludicrous.

Crème de cassis is liqueur made from blackcurrants, and is sweet, but has an intense earthy flavor. Comparisons get made to Chambord, but the earthy notes of cassis are like nothing else I’ve tried.

The most famous cocktails with cassis are the Kir and Kir Royal. These are two ingredient cocktails that mix still or bubbly wine with cassis. Both are easy drinking; there’s nothing challenging or particularly interesting about them, but the citrus notes of the wines play nicely with summer berry flavor of the cassis. If you try them, aim for more acidic wines and champagnes to balance the sweetness and avoid oaked wines.

All told these are both worth drinking if you have a good, but overly tart bottle of wine, and I think they are more interesting drinks than the Chambord variants. On their own though, they weren’t good enough to make me think crème de cassis is a must have. That said, there’s more science to be done on this front…

Kir

  • 3oz white wine
  • 0.5oz créme de cassis

Directions

Pour crème de cassis into glass and top with wine. A quick swirl seems to do the trick for mixing.

Kir Royal

  • 3oz champagne
  • 0.5oz Crème de cassis

Directions

Pour crème de cassis into glass and top with champagne. As with the Kir, a quick swirl seems to do the trick for mixing.

Good piece on the history of the cocktails
https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/460/cocktails/kir-and-kir-royale-cocktail

My preferred cassis so far
https://maisonferrand.com/en/content/mathilde-liqueur/

A perfect sparkling wine for this cocktail from one of my favorite bubbly makers. Also, Breathless is one of three wineries in Healdsburg with a woman winemaker!
https://www.breathlesswines.com/product/Breathless-Blanc-de-Blanc-750ML