Do Real Men Drink Fuzzy Navels?

Oh, please, will you forget about the wine spritzer already? And Perrier with lime is just too, too passe. Still, that doesn’t mean you have to take up heavy drinking. Yes, real mixed drinks are back, but this time with a twist. Colored cocktails are the coolest cooling drinks this summer. And, although high in glamour, they’re low in alcohol content.

At Prezzo in Sherman Oaks, the choicest Valley eatery at the moment, people are ordering blue Hawaiians: a combination of pineapple juice, orange juice, blue Curacao, triple sec and rum. “I like ‘em sweet; I’m not really a drinker,” says regular customer Dana Kornbluth.

At Stanley’s, another Sherman Oaks hot spot, fuzzy navels are the latest thing. “It’s a big drink on the East Coast,” says bartender Brad Wilson, “and by summer it will be really big here too.” Made from fresh orange juice and peach schnapps, fuzzy navels are high on flavor but low on alcohol content. “I’ve been suggesting it a lot,” Wilson says. “People really like it.”

Gustatory Explosion

“The explosion in flavored schnapps is the biggest thing to hit the liquor industry in years,” says Donna-Ann Hayden, spokeswoman for the Mr. Boston line of schnapps. The company has added fruit flavors to the traditional peppermint, spearmint and cinnamon varieties. Besides peach, Mr. Boston makes apple, strawberry, choco-mint, nutcracker (amaretto-flavored) and the new boss-berry (black raspberry-flavored) schnapps.

The odd thing is that many of these drinks first became popular outside of Southern California, although you would think this would be the place to inspire anything new and fruity.

But California is the birthplace, says Hayden, of something called the affair, a mixture of strawberry schnapps, orange juice and cranberry juice. “Depending on how you garnish it,” Hayden notes, “you can call it a bad affair, a great affair, a disastrous affair.”