How a medieval alchemist, trade routes, and Catherine de Medici brought liqueur to the liquor cabinet

"The story of liqueur is a compelling tale of alchemy and empires, exploration and industrialization, medicine and recreation, royalty and the common man," writes journalist and author Lesley Jacobs Solmonson. In her book, Liqueur: A Global History, which is part of the Edible series, she explains how liqueurs went from the hands of the apothecary to those of the mixologist.

Evan Kleiman: You open this absolutely fantastic book with a quote from author Polycarpe Poncelet, who wrote, "I look on a well prepared liqueur as a species of musical air." What a sentence. Can you elaborate on that?

Lesley Jacobs Solmonson: Yeah, it is actually one of my favorite quotes in the world, at this point. Poncelet really captured both the ephemeral nature of liqueur and also this emotional resonance it has. Just like how we taste — ears, eyes, mouth, all that — it is music when you taste a great liqueur.

By definition, what makes a spirit a liqueur? And what distinguishes liquor from liqueur? 

Liqueur is a type of spirit but the way you distinguish it is, it is a base spirit with sugar (there's your key) and some kind of a botanical flavoring. That could vary from fruits to nuts to roots to wood to anything, as long as it's some kind of flavor.

Does the base spirit have to be something particular?

Absolutely not. You have liqueurs that run the gamut from some kind of a neutral spirit to gin, rum, whiskey, even tequila. You can use anything. Based on what you use as your base spirit, it will influence the flavor of that liqueur. 

This poster advertises liqueurs for Marie Brizard et Roger International, a French alcoholic beverage company founded in 1755. Photo courtesy of Lesley Jacobs Solmonson.

Can you explain the term alembic and what it is?

There had been a number of people before a gentleman named Geber, which is what we call him here in the West. His name was Jabir Ibn Hayyan, and he really invented the first, I would say, modern alembic still. Basically what we're looking at here, you kind of have to imagine it, it's two vessels. Think of beakers, sort of. They are connected by a tube. One holds a fermented beverage (so wine, beer, essentially) and the other is empty. 

The wine is heated. It separates the alcohol from the water, and it makes this vapor that goes through the tube and then recondenses in the other container. Then, it keeps going. The condensation returns to its liquid state, it sort of uncondenses, and that's now pure alcohol. That's what made possible this conversion of a lower alcohol by volume, which is ABV beverage, into a higher ABV spirit. What's really cool is they called this spirit "al cool," and so that's where we get our word "alcohol."

What impact did it have? Did it have a preservation impact or was it purely pleasurable?

Well, preservation is definitely the major part. If you leave wine, it is going to ferment more and, at some point, turn into vinegar. Spirits, because of the distillation process, truly don't have that issue. At some point with liqueur, because of the sugar content, they may start losing their potency, and they may get to a point where they really aren't great. There are some that, if you don't put them in a refrigerator, will not be doing well. But the main thing was not only to keep it preserved, but to create a higher alcohol level, and by doing that, it created a better delivery system. So this is how, way back when they were creating perfume, they were creating medicines, which was where we're starting from, as far as liqueur goes.

Who is thought to have created the first true liqueur?

That would be a fellow named Arnaldus de Villa Nova. He was a medieval alchemist. People can question, I think, but really, if you look at what he did, which was taking a brandy spirit (back then, brandy spirit was known as brand divine, so burnt wine) he added sugar to. That was a medical treatment but because of the sugar, you now have a liqueur. He called them cordials, based on the term cordialis, which means "of or pertaining to the heart."

A bottle of creme de cacao, circa 1950s. Photo courtesy of Old Spirits Company.

When did the earliest western liqueurs start to appear? And how did trade routes unlock access to different ingredients?

That was very much the key to everything coming to the West. There were two things. First of all, you have the silk routes, which ran through Asia, the Arab states, into Egypt, and all of that. At a certain point, they also started moving into the Mediterranean. But what really changed things was when the Crusades happened and the Western soldiers went to the Holy Land. They were exposed to all of these different things. They were exposed to sugar. They were exposed to unique botanicals that we didn't have in the West. They brought these things back and sugar alone became a huge commodity, as did things like tea. This was the beginning of it.

There was a huge Muslim influence in the Mediterranean, also, in parts of Italy, in parts of Spain, and these are the areas where you really see the first liqueurs. Italy is really ground central in the West. You were seeing both perfume and liqueur made by very, very early pharmacopeias. 

Your first really big moment where liqueur spread to the rest of Europe was when Catherine de Medici got married to the King of France, Henry II and she brought her love of liqueur with her. She also brought her people of the court and her craftsmen and artisans. Her favorite liqueur was something called alchermes. They've actually started remaking it today, and it is just exquisite. It's spices and citrus and [has] just a beautiful depth of flavor to it.

Alchermes also became, famously, an ingredient that was used in pastry, particularly in Sicilian pastry.

Absolutely. In the alchermes cakes and all that. Very much like you'd use Marsala or something like that in a custard. That's very much because it is baking spices in liqueur.

This botanical print features nutmeg and mace. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons.

I love thinking of it like that. Baking spices. What role did the Dutch religion and politics play in the evolution of the modern liqueur?

The Dutch are exceedingly important for any number of reasons. In the early 1600s, 1602 the VOC, which was the Dutch East India Company, was born. They started traveling East because when everybody started seeing the wealth of things that came from there, from the trade routes, Western Europe decided, as they do, to jump on the bandwagon and take everything for themselves. 

What they did was they went to the East Indies and they "discovered" nutmeg. There were wars fought over nutmeg because it was so valuable. It could practically be used as currency. Nutmeg, mace, cloves, all of these things that you found within those islands would make their way back to Holland and eventually to the rest of Europe. The first distillery in Holland was Bols. That may be a name that people are very familiar with or not familiar with, but if you do drink spirits or liqueur, they are one of the largest and they have been dating back to the 1500s.

That is extraordinary.

They also are the ones who gave birth to gin because Genever, which was a juniper spirit, started there, and then it was brought back to England after soldiers had been fighting in Holland.

"Liqueur is a type of spirit but the way you distinguish it is, it is a base spirit with sugar and some kind of a botanical flavoring," explains Lesley Jacobs Solmonson. Photo by David Solmonson.

When was the medicinal use of these libations abandoned or sort of attenuated to finally give way to recreational drinking?

What's funny is you were still seeing it considered "medicinal" even into the Victorian era, even into the early 1900s. For ladies in the Victorian era and in the late 19th century, it was not considered proper to drink in public or even at home unless you had a man around. So a lot of times the ladies would grow faint. They would have the vapors. Women are so clever, right? Everybody would say, "Oh, bring the cordial. Help revive her." That was one of the many ways they enjoyed sampling liquor. 

Then, going into the early 1900s, you would see drinks called a pick-me-up or things like that. They were considered drinks for the morning after a party. The first cocktail, in fact, in the 1800s, which is basically an Old Fashioned, was considered medicinal, at first.

What is your favorite era of the liqueur and what cocktails are associated with it? 

It's probably kind of a facile answer, and perhaps maybe common, but the Golden Age of the Cocktail is called that for a reason. We're looking at the late 1800s into the early 1900s. There was an exquisite subtlety to cocktails. You really only saw three or four ingredients, in general. Liqueurs played an enormous role in many, many of these drinks. 

There would be hundreds of drinks that we would not have. If you look at, say, The Savoy cocktail book from the 1930s, which is a tome, you could just rip out at least half the pages. I love that era because of the judicious way they used liqueur [and because] of the sophistication and balance of flavors. Luckily, we have now come back to that to the point where even chain restaurants have what they call "craft cocktails" on their menus.

"Liqueur: A Global History" details how liqueurs went from medicinal concoctions to  celebratory libations. Photo courtesy of The University of Chicago Press.