"The Devil of the Andes".

Pisco, the brandy of Peru, is fighting quality concerns to become better known abroad.

IF YOU ARE "BETWEEN PISCO AND NAZCA," ACCORDING TO AN old Peruvian saying, you are happily inebriated. And in the small coastal town of Ica, which lies geographically between Pisco and Nazca, its inhabitants are frequently to be discovered in the state that the saying describes.

"Everyone in the area who has a plot of land and a vine makes his own pisco," Felix, the bartender at Ica's up-market Las Dunas hotel, says as he mixes cocktails made with the liquor, a colorless grape brandy, for visitors. "People still tread the grapes and make it as they have done for centuries. And when there is anything to celebrate--and that's quite often hereabouts--out it comes."

Felix is mixing Peru's national drink, the pisco sour. He does it with panache, not bothering much to measure quantities. The recipe is not complex: three parts pisco, two parts sugar syrup and one part freshly squeezed key lime juice. Into the blender it goes, with plenty of ice and some egg white. A quick whiz and Felix is pouring out the frothy mixture and shaking a little ground cinnamon on top. "Delicious," the tourists respond. "That's how foreigners like it," Felix says. "Peruvians usually prefer it drier, with only one part syrup."

Despite its popularity inside Peru, pisco is little known abroad. That is hardly surprising, given that only a 10th of the 8,400 hectares devoted to grape-growing in Peru produce the varieties from which pisco is made. Annual production is some 1.2 million liters, and a large percentage of that is the "informal" pisco made in the Ica and Moquegua valleys, which never gets more than a few miles from where it is produced. Exports have rarely topped $250,000 a year.

Still, Peru's Export Promotion Commission (Prompex) is campaigning to get pisco better known. "It's the product that, above all others, reflects Peru and its history," says Fernando Ego-Aguirre, who looks after pisco and other niche exports for Promex and is also head of the National Pisco Commission.

Pisco was born in the desert coastal region south of Lima, where the Paracas culture--famed for its extraordinarily fine textiles--flourished between 300 B.C. and 200 A.D. Although the area looks depressingly barren except where it is crossed by rivers running down from the high Andes to the east, the ancient civilizations mastered the art of irrigation, channeling the precious water so that barely a drop was wasted. In the Ica area, a wide variety of plants and fruits flourished. When the Spanish conquerors arrived in the area in the 16th century, they discovered ideal conditions for planting the vines they had brought from the Canary Islands.

The origins of the name have nothing to do with alcohol. In Quechua, "pisscu" means a small bird. The name was bestowed to the oasis-like plains where condors and other mountain birds stopped to rest between the high Andes and the Pacific Ocean in search of food. Skilled potters living in the area were also known as "piscos." They fashioned containers made of adobe, or baked mud, used to ferment a variety of alcoholic beverages. As the years passed, pisco came to be used to designate either the drinking vessels, the people who made them or their contents.

Somewhat confusingly, Pisco is also the name of the port from which the grape brandy was shipped. Today, it is a rather unprepossessing town surrounded by fish meal-processing plants. But it appears on maps that date back to the late 16th century. During the 17th and 18th centuries, few Spanish ships sailed from Pisco without large consignments of the sweet-tasting but potent brandy on board. Historical records show that much was exported along the Pacific seaboard to Valparaiso to the south and Guayaquil to the north, as well as to Spain.

The oldest mention of pisco is found in 1613, when historian Lorenzo Huertas wrote of a will in which a master bequeathed to his slave "vats full of brandy and a large copper cauldron" in which she could prepare it. In 1630, Spanish chronicler Francisco Lopez de Caravantes called pisco "one of the most exquisite liquors that can be drunk in the entire world."

Today, surprisingly little has changed about the way it is made. In a simple, rustic process, the grapes are pressed and the fresh juice is heated until it evaporates, then cooled. Water is never added to dilute it. The resulting "brandy" is transparent or slightly amber in color with a pure alcohol content of between 38 degrees and 46 degrees proof.

Varieties are classified by their taste, rather than their scent. There is pure pisco, generally favored by pisco connoisseurs and made from the Quebranta grape, a non-aromatic variety that is the result of genetic mutations of the ordinary black grape introduced by the Spaniards. Then there is the aromatic pisco made from grapes such as Italia, Torontel and Moscatel, which has a distinctive scent. Pisco acholado is made from a blend of varieties, both aromatic and Quebranta. Finally "green" pisco is made from only partially fermented juices. Locals like to vary their pisco diet by flavoring it with local fruits, including fig, mango, cherry, lemon or chirimoya (custard apple).

The Ica valley is home to one of Peru's best-known "formal" producers of pisco: Tacama. Set in 150 hectares of vineyards, the offices of the 100-year-old wine- and pisco-producing and exporting company are housed in the tranquil setting of a former colonial convent, complete with chapel and ancient bell tower.

By contrast, Tacama's production facilities are state-of-the art. The hacienda-much smaller today than prior to the 1973 land "reform"--produces Peru's best-known wines (some of which are exported) and, on a much smaller scale, two brands of pisco: pure and acholado, the latter under the trademark El Demonio de los Andes (The Devil of the Andes).

Production methods have changed little. Pisco still involves copper cauldrons and the traditional shape of the alambique, or still, has not changed in centuries. But in a concession to modernity, once fermentation and evaporation are complete and the brandy is distilled, it is stored in vats made of concrete, replacing the traditional, more romantic adobe botijas (vats).

"It's the same system as in colonial times," says Robert Niederman, Tacama's French-born enologist. "We cannot modernize: Peruvian norms do not allow it."

Tacama produces between 5,000 and 6,000 cases of pisco a year, most of which goes for internal consumption. Export promotion efforts, Niederman says, have brought few results to date. "It requires a great deal of care," he warns. "It would be disastrous to enter the international market with a substandard product, and there are very few pisco producers today who can absolutely guarantee a legitimate, quality product." Still, pisco promoters are going to try.

Pisco Face-off

IF PERUVIANS CLAIM THE PISCO SOUR AS THEIR NATIONAL DRINK, SO TOO do their southern Chilean neighbors.

Indeed, Chile has stolen something of a march on Peru, exporting respectable quantities of pisco alongside its now well-established and internationally popular wines.

Chile laid claim to pisco as early as 1931. Several years later, to reinforce that claim, the government renamed an entire Chilean valley Pisco. It was not until almost 60 years later that Peruvian officials woke up to that fact and made their own counterclaims, which, for the past two or three years, they have been pressing through Peru's National Pisco Comission, established in 1997.

Luis Alonso Garcia Munoz, head of the trademark office at Indecopi, Peru's consumer protection and intellectual property watchdog, says that 1991 legislation means the name "pisco" can now be used within Peru only for the product of certain defined valleys that is made in a clearly specified manner.

"The grape, the soil and the method is what gives pisco its distinctive character," he says. "Just as champagne from the Champagne region of France is the real thing, so with pisco. [Defining pisco like this] identifies the product's personality helps win market share and gives value added."

Peru has banned imports of any product called "pisco"--most of which have come from Chile. It has also persuaded its Andean Community partners--Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia--that its claim to the name is superior to Chile's. "Any Chilean pisco found in Peru is contraband," Garcia Munoz insists.

But with its long experience in marketing wines, Chile has been able to position its pisco internationally. If you drink a pisco sour in the United States or Europe, the main ingredient is likely to be Chilean." If pisco is part of our national heritage, that doesn't mean we should leave it as a monument. There are economic aspects, too," Garcia Munoz says.

Some purists are less forgiving. "But if it's not Peruvian, it's not pisco," insists Luis Cabieses, pisco specialist and advisor to Peru's National Manufacturers Association (SNI).

Robert Niederman, enologist at Peruvian pisco producer Tacama, is a little more conciliatory. "Chilean pisco is made from different grapes--they do not have the Quebranta variety--and its alcoholic content is lower. Really, it's a completely different product," he says. "l think we should each market our own under the names Peruvian pisco or Chilean pisco--and let the customer decide which he prefers."