Gin & Tonic: Spain’s Obsession, Despite the Recession

Citrus: Not half a lime sloppily squeezed and plopped into the glass, the fallback method for bad bartenders the world over, but a BandAid-size sliver of peel, carefully separated from the bitter pith of a lemon or lime. In Spain bartenders use a thin set of tongs to ruffle the peel, teasing out its fragrant essential oils, then rub the cut side all around the glass. Be sure to give it a twist before you cast it off.

These are the essential ingredients of a good gin and tonic, but every bit as essential is the glass you serve it in. Gin and tonics are normally served in a highball glass, but that defeats the whole purpose. Like a great glass of wine, a gin and tonic is about the aroma, the bouquet of the botanicals that mark the complex ingredients (at least ten, but often dozens) that go into the distillation process. To bathe in that awesome bloom you really need to plant your entire beak inside the glass. Hence the big-bellied cabernet glasses you find at every decent bar in Spain. Actually, this point has become so obvious that even the bad bars have figured it out.

But for me the greatest part of Spanish gin tonic culture isn’t the 12-euro cocktail that comes with a paragraph description of its virtues. It’s the fact that even the basic bars, the ones serving canned seafood and flat beer, know how to make a mean G and T. My favorite place to drink a gin tonic is a small neighborhood bar a few streets away from the Sagrada Familia called, appropriately, the Bodega de Barri (“neighborhood bar” in Catalan). The owner, Pascual, is 70 years old, with thick glasses, a shock of white hair, and a smile that stretches to Madrid.

“I drank my first gin tonic at 14 years,” he told me recently as he poured out four fingers of gin into a massive wine glass. “I hated it. But I kept coming back to it and it eventually won me over.”

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