For some spirits, a signature cocktail is a gateway to consumers. For others, it’s something of a dead end.
“Pisco is stuck in pisco sour jail,” said Kami Kenna, a partner in the pisco brand Piscología.
Kenna is referring to the Chilean and Peruvian grape distillate whose flagship cocktail is made with lemon juice and egg whites— with the latter making it less approachable than, say, a margarita. The number one cocktail in the U.S. has become an onramp for tequila’s rise. But while that drink has become a boost for tequila adoption in the U.S., cocktails are just one piece of a broader effort to push pisco into the American bar scene.
According to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, global pisco volumes grew by 8% in 2021, compared with 2020, with value increasing by 9%. But forecasts aren’t optimistic: IWSR expected a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) drop of 0.5% from 2021 to 2026.
In the U.S., pisco is well behind sales of other Latin American spirits such as agave or rum, but stakeholders in the category are hopeful that pisco’s versatility, connection to terroir and the rise of other artisanal clear spirits will give it a boost. They’ll have to tackle a perception problem as well as staffing challenges on-premise to realize those potential gains— and all on a limited budget.
Does The Flagship Cocktail Help or Harm?
About 99% of Chilean pisco is consumed in its home country, according to Claudio Escobar, manager of the Pisco Producers Association. While Peruvian and Chilean pisco has been distilled for centuries, there’s been a bit of a “wake up” in the Chilean market recently, with international importers engaging and more brands exporting on a global level, said Escobar.
Still, that export quantity is small: Of about 70 companies that have 200 brands, less than ten are currently “seriously” exporting, according to Escobar. There are only three Chilean companies exporting to the U.S., the category’s largest foreign market.
The problem is that the category “is little-known on a global scale,” and it needs a tremendous amount of education to build demand, he said. Escobar is convinced that pisco’s versatility as a cocktail base could be its entry point, arguing that Chile’s high-volume brands offer a consistency at a price-point bars can leverage on menus while offering the consumer something different.
“From the bar perspective, there is an attractiveness to the real flavor, the experience, the quality of this double distillation, and at the same time, the profitability of using pisco,” said Escobar, whose organization is plotting a route-to-market strategy with an international study on cocktails first.
But so far, a race to the well has created a perception battle.
Perception Shift Needed
Pisco is experiencing a bifurcation that’s happening among a few higher end brands, and the rest that are pisco sour driven, said Kenna.
“I think the main obstacle is pricing, especially at Peruvian restaurant accounts,” said Kenna.
There’s little incentive for price-driven restaurants or bars to premiumize their pisco selection when they can buy a $20 bottle and “pump out a million pisco sours.”
That creates what Kenna sees as a lack of seriousness around Pisco. There needs to be a “reason to care about pisco,” she said, and many of the major players in the U.S. aren’t branded in a modern way that’s calling Americans’ attention to the spirit.
Piscología is one of the few brands intentionally designed for modern spirit enthusiasts: the female-owned and distilled brand puts its producer front and center, along with grape varietals, and traditional production techniques, similar to the kind of chatter that makes mezcal or natural wine nerds geek out. Kenna isn’t on board with the comparison of mezcal to pisco as a spirit – it discounts the much longer relationship between agave and people in Mexico, she noted – but acknowledged the category’s marketing is where pisco can take cues.
“The reason why mezcal has had so much success is because there’s so much humanity in it,” she said. “We are curious about the agave, the variety, region, the process, and the human beings behind it.”
But pisco is often put in the larger category of brandy, and that’s not an easy bucket to climb out of either.
“I bet four out of five people couldn’t even tell you what brandy is,” said Patrick Timmis who at the time of our interview was beverage director at the Chicago-based Bien Trucha restaurant group. “And then you start going into cognac, armagnac, pisco, all these subcategories.”
It’s the job of the bartender to spread the word about pisco, because echoing Kenna’s frustrations, “this stuff isn’t selling itself by any means,” Timmis said. At Bien Trucha’s Latin American-focused restaurants, it’s in the hands of bartenders and mixologists to feature pisco, talk about it, and guide customers into a relatively new practice: sipping clear spirits. However, the scene behind the bar has changed since other emerging spirits took off largely thanks to bartenders acting as unofficial ambassadors.
Education Relies On Small Brands
Wth staffing shortages and veteran bartenders aging out of the industry during the pandemic, Timmis said many restaurant groups are trying to achieve the same level of service and craft as pre-COVID but with a less seasoned and available labor market.
On-premise establishments are streamlining bar programs (think cocktails on tap or ready-to-drink cocktails) to lessen the labor, but that “slowly detracts from the amount of complexity you can inject into a program,” he said. There’s less capacity and interest in training, which translates to less education for the customer.
Social media was also emerging at the time of mezcal’s introduction into the American market, and now smaller brands of any spirit are fighting against much more noise.
So, with marketing and education still nascent, distributors of some of the biggest brands and large restaurant groups are flocking to Piscologia’s expert certification course. The program was established as a way to streamline education about pisco, with Kenna arguing that Piscoloogía is the study of everything around pisco— not just their own brand. Other brands in emerging categories, like sake, are offering similar services for industry professionals.
Suyo, which launched in 2019 with two single-origin Peruvian expressions and now drops limited releases under 200 bottles, is taking a slow and steady approach to education. The brand, founded by two Peruvian-Americans, recently won $100,000 as the winner of InvestBev’s spring 2024 cohort pitch competition.
“Thanks to the overwhelming interest we’ve seen over the past couple of months, we are excited to be evaluating options that will allow us to capitalize on this positive momentum and pursue opportunities that we didn’t have the resources for previously,” said co-founder Alex Hildebrandt.
Since launch, the founders have prioritized getting into Michelin-star restaurants and high-end mixology bars, where staff is invested in spirit education and can reach the right spirit enthusiast.
“Hopefully the longer term trickle down effects happen via those accounts, where people see innovation,” said Hildebrandt.
The Suyo team also just took its U.S. distributors for the first time to Peru, a trip that they hope to expand every year. Those educational tours have been part of what has grown tequila and mezcal, and Hildebrant believes they’ll also provide a missing link for Pisco.
“But obviously that requires dollars and it takes time and we need other brands who share that vision with us to get people down there,” he said.
Hildebrandt believes the more quality brands available in the American market, the higher the tide will rise.
Pisco Chile’s Escobar is aiming to get up to 10 more Chilean brands into the U.S. next year, but resources are limited.
“Part of the challenge is the capacity of the industry to invest in the international market,” he said. “Resources are limited to advance faster.”