El diablo de los Andes.

• Author: Bowen, Sally
• Position: El brandy Pisco; Peru - TT: "The Devil of the Andes". - TA: Pisco brandy; Peru

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," Félix, 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."

Félix 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 Félix is pouring out the frothy mixture and shaking a little ground cinnamon on top. "Delicious," the tourists respond. "That's how foreigners like it," Félix 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...