Tempest in a Glass of Pisco

The national drink of Peru is a clear liquor distilled from grapes that grow in and around the valleys of a region called Pisco. In neighboring Chile, they too make a clear liquor distilled from grapes. That drink is also called pisco.

For Johnny Schuler, Peru’s leading pisco connoisseur and president of the Brotherhood of Pisco Tasters, the existence of a Chilean drink claiming the name pisco is a kind of theft, like the 19th century Chilean invasion that wrested away Peru’s southernmost province.

So, backed by Peru’s vice president and a bevy of Cabinet ministers, Schuler and other members of the pisco elite here have come up with a plan.

Like politicians looking for votes, they conduct tasting sessions with influential European wine masters in swank Madrid hotels, hoping to win influential converts to the idea of Peruvian pisco’s superiority. They circulate historical documents proving pisco’s 16th century provenance on the Peruvian side of the border -- even though no border existed then.

The Chileans have countered with a series of media reports dismissing Peru’s pisco as second-rate swill. And both sides have launched diplomatic offensives from their embassies in Brussels, Ottawa, Mexico City and at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva.

“We’ve been asleep for 450 years, but now we’re fighting back,” said Schuler, an ebullient restaurateur with a showman’s booming voice. “We want Chile to say pisco is from Peru. We want them to stop using our name.”

The battle over pisco is but one of dozens of worldwide tussles over regional product names -- known to trade lawyers as “designations of origin” or “geographical indications.” Such names are recognized and protected, to a certain degree, by the same international treaties that protect computer software as intellectual property.

In September, WTO ministers will meet in Cancun, Mexico, to consider a European proposal to enforce WTO-recognized “denominations of origin” in all 146 member countries.

Until then, various countries are pursuing legal and other actions. Greece, the birthplace of feta cheese, successfully petitioned the high court of the European Union in October to force German and Danish imitators to stop using the name.

Mexican diplomats have fended off a challenge to their country’s tequila monopoly from South African producers of an agave-based liquor.

On May 20, the producer of Parma hams in Italy won a case in Europe’s highest court against English imitators, the latest in a series of Italian battles against “food piracy.”

In all those cases, as in South America’s pisco war, the controversy is a blend of cultural nationalism and economic expediency.

The Italians, for example, say that all the ersatz Parmesan cheese being sold around the world lowers the reputation of the real thing. Eat Parmesan made in the region around Bologna and Parma -- where people have been making it for more than 600 years -- and you will never touch a Wisconsin “Parmesan” again, they say. And Italian cheese makers will be a little richer.

So it goes with pisco.

Alfredo Gordillo makes pisco just like his grandparents did, with grapes grown in the narrow river valleys that run along Peru’s arid Pacific Coast.

He held aloft a glass of his pisco and asked a visitor to note the distinctive fruity aroma. That, he said, is something you won’t find in that grape brandy they make in Chile.

“Pisco in Peru is a way of life. It’s part of our culture,” Gordillo said.

You can drink the 80-proof liquid straight -- in small sips, like cognac. To the uninitiated, it might taste a bit like rum. But allow it to linger in your mouth and you will soon take in its hint of citrus and walnuts.

Chileans also mix it with cola to create “piscola”; Peruvians use lemon juice, an egg white and other ingredients to make “pisco sour.”

Gordillo’s grapes ferment into wine at his bodega in Mala, about 50 miles southeast of Lima. The wine is then cooked in a caldron the size of a small truck. From the top, through the caldron’s brass swan’s neck, comes the silky liquor called pisco.

Good pisco, like good art, can’t be rushed.

“I can get pisco after just two hours, but to make it right, you have to let it cook for eight,” Gordillo said. And he throws away the first and last bit of what comes out of the caldron, keeping just the succulent “body.”

Chilean producers, Gordillo said, make pisco quicker but with such a high alcohol content that they have to add water to make it drinkable.

“Here in Peru, we’re inefficient,” Gordillo said. “But it’s on purpose. It’s a very old, ancestral process.”

Pisco might as well be a metaphor for the two countries’ history since the fall of the Inca empire in the 16th century. Peru has produced cultural treasures often exploited -- and appreciated more -- by outsiders. The Chileans, meanwhile, have become South America’s most successful merchants and marketers.

And so, Peruvians must concede a painful truth: Chileans make more pisco than they do, export more and make more money from it too.

The Chileans’ success with pisco parallels the great triumph of their wines. In fact, the Chileans say their pisco is better because their grapes are better, because their climate is more moderate, more Mediterranean.

“From the climatic and vinicultural point of view, Chile is to Peru as Europe is to Senegal,” Fernando Morales Barria, a Chilean wine expert, wrote recently in a letter to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. “No one in Europe will buy a liquor made from grapes grown on lands better suited to growing sugar cane.”

Morales also pointed out that Chile won one of the first prizes ever given to a pisco abroad, a gold medal at a Brussels gastronomic fair in the 1990s.

Each time pisco is associated with Chile, it is a blow to Peruvian pride, something the Mexican rock group Mana recently found out the hard way.

“We’ve come from the land of tequila to the land of the pisco sour,” the group’s leader, Fher, told the audience at a music festival in Chile in February. The next day, a Peruvian television host and a Peruvian rock band were launching a boycott of Mana records.

Even the highest officials of both governments have been drawn into the debate, which is now a regular fixture in the Chilean and Peruvian media. “The Pisco War: Krauss Responds to the Peruvians,” read a typical headline, in the Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias, referring to an interview with Enrique Krauss, Chile’s ambassador to Spain.

Peru’s vice president, Raul Diez Canseco, had just been to Spain to promote pisco. He implied that Chile was trying to steal something uniquely Peruvian, saying, “If you fall asleep, you might find another country trying to trademark your country’s name.”

The Chilean ambassador replied that the Peruvian vice president’s remarks “descended to the style of a drunken brawl.”

A few weeks later, Diez Canseco returned triumphant to Lima, having convinced people in Spain, he said, of the superiority of Peruvian pisco.

At a news conference, with the foreign minister and the economy minister at his side, Diez Canseco showed a videotape of his trip that included a pisco tasting at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid.

On the tape, Spanish wine expert Maria Isabel Mijares offers her verdict on Peruvian pisco.

“It is a product that grows in the mouth, that enters with a timid playfulness and that later fills the palate,” Mijares says. “Pisco is Peruvian! And pisco is Peru!”

Just about everyone agrees that the drink was first produced in and around Pisco, the Peruvian port city that has had that name since the early days of the Spanish colonization of South America. The name is derived, Peruvian historians say, from a Quechua word for the clay flasks that were used to store the liquor.

The Peruvians say Chilean troops took pisco home with them after occupying part of their country during the 1879-83 War of the Pacific. The Chileans counter that they were making pisco long before then.

By the 20th century, pisco was well entrenched in Chile’s Elqui valley, sparking early Peruvian efforts to trademark pisco as a regional brand name.

In 1939, Chile took a step historians on both sides of the border agree was an attempt to head off Peru’s pisco lobby: They renamed a town in the valley that gave birth to both Chilean pisco and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral. The town of Union became “Pisco Elqui.”

For Schuler, Peru’s pisco maven, this is an especially egregious example of Chilean revisionism.

“Imagine if the United States changed the name of Los Angeles to ‘Tequila’ so they could say tequila was American and not Mexican,” he said.

In recent years, with Chile’s pisco production growing, both sides have stepped up their diplomatic efforts, signing a series of bilateral treaties that staked out territory for their pisco.

Chile’s trade agreements with Mexico and Canada include clauses that recognize “pisco” as a Chilean name, in exchange for Chilean recognition of products like tequila and Canadian whiskey. Peru has similar agreements with Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia.

In a free-trade agreement with Chile to be ratified this year, the European Union recognizes pisco as Chilean but also reserves the right to grant such a status to Peru.

Chile, in turn, will phase out the use of the word “champagne” for its sparkling wines, recognizing it as a French denomination. The concession was important to the French, given the growing exports of the Chilean product. By comparison, the amount of pisco entering Europe is minuscule.

“Look, this whole thing is ridiculous,” said one Chilean trade lawyer who asked not to be named. All those pisco clauses attached to Chilean trade agreements were mostly symbolic chest-thumping to impress voters, he said.

“The money involved is not important,” the lawyer said. Most Chilean pisco, like most Peruvian pisco, is for domestic consumption. Chile makes about 10 million gallons of pisco each year, more than 20 times the production in Peru. But the value of exported Chilean pisco is less than $1 million annually.

“We are not sending dozens of trucks over the Andes full of pisco,” the lawyer said.

Be that as it may, the Peruvians are not prepared to concede a single bottle of the pisco market to the Chileans.

In April, Vice President Diez Canseco announced that Peru would reduce the tax on pisco producers by half. Pisco is an official “flag product” of Peru and is, by law, the first drink served at any Peruvian diplomatic function.

The government also has named a National Pisco Commission to promote higher pisco standards -- including, among other things, strict regulations on the temperature at which pisco is produced.

“The Chileans are ahead of us at the moment,” said Carlos Ferraro, Peru’s national director of industries, conceding that Chileans guard against additives that increase alcohol content but lower quality. “In Chile, if they see a bag of sugar at a pisco bodega, they shut it down.”

In Peru, where anyone and everyone makes pisco, you can easily buy a bottle that isn’t really pisco at all.

High standards will be necessary if Peru is to meet what officials here say is their long-term goal: the World Trade Organization’s recognition of pisco as an exclusively Peruvian denomination.

“I think this is a battle we will win in the long run,” Ferraro said, adding that all the historical evidence is in Peru’s favor. “We have the port called Pisco. And a river called Pisco. And a valley