Desert Rain Cocktail

At New York City’s cozy new spot Corima, every dish and cocktail highlights ingredients from Northern Mexico. The bar is fittingly packed with bottles of tequila, mezcal, raicilla, and Sotol, which you’ll enjoy alongside sourdough tortillas served with smoky, slightly sweet recado negro butter, as well as chocolate flan served with a delicate seaweed tuille. 

The inspiration for the Desert Rain was to highlight Sotol in something more spirit-forward and elegant that drank like a Martini or Vesper, as opposed to a Margarita riff. — Oset Babür-Winter

What makes the Desert Rain cocktail work?

The Desert Rain is a simple, three-ingredient cocktail with a base of Sotol, a distilled spirit made from a group of plants in the dasylirion genus. While Sotol is often compared to mezcal in flavor the two shouldn’t be used interchangeably. 

“Sotol’s flavor runs the gamut from mildly salty, grassy sweetness to full-on tropical fruit and pungent eucalyptus laced with smoldering hardwoods,” says author and Food & Wine contributor Margarett Waterbury. “In Mexico, sotol is usually sipped neat, but American bartenders have embraced it as a super-versatile cocktail ingredient.” On Corima’s menu, mixologist Sam Geller also features Sotol in place of bourbon in a bright, must-try riff on the classic Paper Plane.

Coupled with Cocchi Americano, a bittersweet, slightly floral Italian fortified wine that we highly recommend using to upgrade your next spritz, Sotol’s herbaceous flavor shines through in every sip of the Desert Rain. Dry vermouth (Dolin’s works well here) rounds out the drink and adds a bit of complexity thanks to the added spice and herbal notes.  Vince Ott, general manager of Corima, believes the Cocchi Americano and vermouth add just enough sweetness and complexity to balance out the earthy and herbal flavor of the Sotol without masking it. The lack of citrus in the drink really lets the Sotol pop as well. 

Notes From the Food & Wine Test Kitchen

For a lower-ABV version of this cocktail, try substituting white verjus in place of the vermouth. Don’t have a coupe glass handy? The Desert Rain is meant to be simple, so feel free to use a rocks glass — we won’t tell.