Wine of the Country

Behind the high mahogany bar in Lima's Hotel Bolivar, the bartender poured a slug of water-clear liquor into a silver shaker, added lime juice, sugar, beaten white of egg, and ice, shook hard, then poured the mixture into a small glass. When Angostura had been sprinkled on the top, another pisco sour was ready for -the pre-luncheon crowd filling up Lima's best-known meeting place.

Pisco, a powerful grape brandy, is a Peruvian national institution. Haughty hacendados and barefoot Indian peasants swig it at births and wakes; special bottles are kept tucked away for anniversaries and visits from old friends. Its type and flavor depend largely on the grapes from which it is made; Peruvians say they can tell something about a man's character by the type he orders.

The man ordering pisco Italia, which has a heady, perfumed bouquet, is labeled by fellow drinkers as a little short in the masculine virtues. The heavy, sweet flavor of pisco moscatel (distilled from muscatel wine) is for the unsophisticated drinker. The young blade disappointed in love seeks forgetfulness in eight or ten straight shots of cherry-flavored pisco. The pisco connoisseur drinks the high-powered Moquegua, distilled from the grapes of the dry, sandy soil of southern Peru.

In all Lima, pisco is rarely drunk with more relish than in the Cantina de los Medicos, across the Rimac River from the capital. There, in a jumble of jars and bottles behind the musty bar, humble Peruvians may find, steeping in pisco, herb cures for almost every ill known to man.

"We fix everything," boasts the black-haired little bartender. "What have you got?" To the client complaining of ulcers, he says: "Muy bien, senor. For you, pisco from a bottle of turnip. That'll be 1 1/2 soles [11-c-]." In a huge green bottle beside the ulcer cure soaks a banana. "Si senor, bananas. They are to cure dandruff. The pisco sits for a month, absorbing the dandruff-eliminating elements and the hair-restoring elements right out of the banana. That's camomile steeping in the next bottle. Cures malaria. If you want to get fat, you can have pisco from the strawberry bottle; if you want to get thin, pisco puro, solo [straight]."

Habitues of the Cantina de los Medicos swear that a man once given up for dead by Lima doctors was brought to the cantina as a last resort. There the barman reached for la botella especial--the special bottle tucked away under the bar. After the bartender had dealt him a single snort, the dying man arose from his litter and walked away. He had drunk pisco ^from a rough, clear glass bottle in which was coiled, eyes open, a green garter snake.

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