Russia may be the land of vodka, Scotland the land of whiskey, France the land of wine, but Central Europe is definitely a land of fruit distillates. Slivovica, hruškovica, malinovica, etc. You take plums, pears, raspberries, apricots, any fruit, you name it... and I bet that people in here can AND WILL turn it into an alcohol. Alcohol production is a fairly typical part of our lives (yep, never the truest words did I say before). I actually never met a Slovak whose family didn't produce their own wine or distillate (if not every year then at least once in their lives). My family was big on wine and as a kid I spent every September grape picking. The tradition lives now with my cousins (and luckily for me no grape picking anymore). Yep, my laziness is talking for me, again.
So what I am trying to say - yesterday I had an opportunity to attend a tasting of fantastic R.Jelinek Moravian fruit distillates. Unfortunately I didn't grab my camera so I'll try to improvise.
The line up looked like this:
Yes, we call them as we call the fruits they are made of. It always sounds nice (and innocent) to drink pear or plum, doesn't it? But these puppies pack a punch, holy moly 40%.
We all got empty little glasses and glasses of water and I started to pray that I will not get drunk TOO QUICKLY. First we tasted bare distillates and then we moved on to cocktails. I preferred the taste of cherry, while Mary liked pear and Jarush liked plum. We all agreed that raspberry and strawberry tasted kind of fake. And of the cocktails - the ginger, elderberry with pear was the best one!
After the tasting we proceeded to have a serious discussion about Apple and Android. - Yep, we started to have a serious argument. You know, first world problems. So I decided to change the topic to cars and let me tell you, after about 30 minutes of us (me and the guys) showing each other the videos of BMWs and Audis and Maseratis, the girls were none too happy about it.
So we decided to move on to Wine-bar in the centre of Nitra where a friend of Jarush is working. It's a perfect little cozy place.
And we continued to do our tasting of Slovak alcohol - with a lovely Devin wine from Repa Winery. The four of us - me, Mary, Jarush and Marek (I don't know why but we always end up like this - the four of us. But I like it veeery much). We polished of some plates of prosciutto and olives and sun-dried tomatoes as if we were starving. So I ordered another big plate of different cheeses and another prosciutto and olives. And let me tell you, even if I had my camera I wouldn't be able to take a picture of it. The food disappeared as if by magic. Good times.
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