If By “If Necessary It Can Be Stored, Corked And Refrigerated, For Up To One Week After Opening” You Mean Forget About It In The Lower Door Shelf Of The Refrigerator For More Than A Year, Then I’m Right There With You

There was a little bit of manzanilla sherry in the refrigerator from “a while ago” so I Googled a cocktail around it and found this slideshow idea, which doesn’t actually use manzanilla sherry but rather amontillado but which I thought that, in the spectrum of sherry, was close enough. In effect, it’s a cutting-corners recipe.

OK, so we didn’t use the basil leaves the recipe called for, nor did we use the amontillado sherry. And we substituted an off-brand Grand Marnier for Cointreau. And of course we omitted the orange twist, but that’s like every night, because who really keeps citrus fruit around just to construct twists? If you’re doing that you clearly don’t really drink.

So given all that: Dry sherry, Rye whiskey, Grand Marnier (or some such), lemon juice and orange bitters. It was tart and, as Jen mentioned, you kind of wanted more of that nutty sherry flavor. I was intrigued by the way the rye disappeared; not sure how that happened except that everything else piled on could easily blot it out. This is when I think there should be a Likert Scale of relative cocktailia happiness but of course there isn’t.