Confident but clueless

“Do you have any blue curaçao?” I asked the clerk behind the counter at the local liquor store, being careful to pronounce it in one of the two ways that I know it’s commonly said.

“What’s that?” he replied.

“It’s the blue liqueur used for blue drinks like the Blue Hawaiian,” I said confidently, mentioning perhaps the most famous of all blue drinks.

When I turned 21, I remembered that my only instruction to the bartender on that night was, “Give me something blue.” And he did: a Blue Hawaiian — or two, much to my regret the next morning. Ah, to be that young and that stupid again.

I had already looked up and down the liquor aisles myself. I have arranged enough liquor rooms to understand the groupings. In fact, it used to be almost universal. It was always vodka, gin, rum, whiskey, Scotch, brandy and then alphabetized liqueurs. When tequila’s popularity came on strong in the late ’80s and ’90s, it was added as a category to the end of those others. In fact, many a speed rail behind the bar (where the liquors are kept within arm’s reach) was set up just like that. These days, those main categories are further supplemented by mezcal, sometimes mixed in with tequila and sometimes separately. Pisco, a South American brandy; cachaça, a Brazilian sugar distillate; and aquavit, a Scandinavian liquor, never made it big enough to warrant their very own categories.

And this liquor store was no different. I figured it would either be under the “Bs” or maybe in with the other curaçaos: triple sec and orange. It wasn’t.

Curaçao is named after the island in the West Indies that is both a separate country and a constituent island within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The citrus that grows on that island, the Laraha, is a bitter orange that was derived from the Seville orange, which morphed into an entirely different fruit due to the climate in the Caribbean. The Laraha is very bitter, green and considered inedible on its own. So naturally they sweetened it up and made it into a liqueur. That original orange-colored liqueur would morph into the clear triple sec curaçao (which means triple dry in French), which is the backbone of such famous cocktails as the margarita, sidecar, cosmopolitan and White Lady. A sweet liqueur made from a bitter Spanish fruit, grown on a Dutch island, having a mistaken forename in French and an oddly accented surname in Portuguese and used primarily for North American cocktails. Boy, how I love the liquor business!

Triple sec itself was pioneered by three great confectioners — Combier, Cointreau and Grand Marnier — as a premium liqueur. But eventually every great thing eventually succumbs to gimmickry — the Mustang II, anyone? — and in 1912, Bols, a liquor producer in Amsterdam, created the very first blue version of triple sec. Why? I don’t know. Ask the Dutch.

The word “curaçao” itself is thought to be a derivative of the double-accented Portuguese word “coração,” which means “heart” and is thought to have been inspired by the island of Curaçao’s heart-shaped coastline. But that little remaining accent on the second “c” is a clue as to how to pronounce the word. Called a cedilla, it’s a diacritic mark that appears below the letter c and changes its pronunciation from a hard “k” sound to a soft “s” sound. So, the word “curaçao” is pronounced either “cur-a-soe” or “cur-a-saw.”

Which made the clerk’s next comment a little odd.

“Oh. You must mean blue curacao (no accent),” he said.

And he pronounced it “cur-a-cow.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“I didn’t understand you because you mispronounced it,” he added for no apparent reason.

“Sure,” I said with very little conviction.

“You did,” he insisted.

“OK,” I responded.

I think he sensed that I didn’t agree.

“It’s curacao,” he said, pronouncing it again “cur-a-cow.”

“I know,” he added. “I’ve been doing this for almost five years.”

“Sure,” I said again, handing him my business credit card for the purchase.

He read the name “Barfly” on the card.

“Are you some kind of writer?” he asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

“I’ve always wanted to be in the newspaper,” he replied.

“Maybe you could quote me as an expert?” he added.

“Maybe,” I said. “Who knows, perhaps you’ll get your wish sooner than you realize.”

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• You can’t teach someone anything if they don’t want to learn.

• “I know that I know nothing,” Socrates said.

• In the bar and liquor business, you just never know who you might be speaking to.

• Be careful of what you wish for, because you just might get it.