Inflation-hit Buenos Aires bars reinvent their cocktails using local ingredients, and earn global recognition
- Raging inflation, fluctuating exchange rates and import restrictions in Argentina have made obtaining classic cocktail ingredients from overseas unpredictable
- As a result, Buenos Aires bartenders have turned to local replacements to create cocktails and vermouths infused with botanicals harvested from the Andes
With annual inflation running at over 200 per cent, and prices rising weekly, times are tough for Porteños – the residents of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
And yet the city’s cocktail bars are bustling with eager drinkers and buzzing with an inventiveness that is perhaps the only positive side effect of the country’s long-term economic distress.
Foreign exchange restrictions make it impractical to import classic cocktail ingredients, so the Argentinians have turned to making local versions instead, and producing brand new concoctions from their own wines, locally made spirits, and botanicals picked from Andean mountainsides.
The enduring, purely alcohol masterpieces on which Buenos Aires bartenders built their global reputations in the 1950s are all still available, as are the classic recipes brought in long ago by Americans in exile from the Prohibition of the 1920s.
But there is a growing movement towards new, lower-alcohol cocktails and a revival in the popularity of the vermouths imported by Italian and French immigrants a century ago, although completely reinvented and locally made.
A driving force in this revival has been Martín Auzmendi, cocktail history writer and co-founder of Buenos Aires Cocktail Week, and his partners.
