São Paulo
The barman's white shirtsleeves are bunched up at his elbows, showing his tattoos. This is the sort of place where staff are decidedly cooler than the clientele, who have spilled out from nearby offices, ties loosened, but unable to shake that awkward corporate look. In front of me is the bar's signature cocktail: Terra da Garoa, meaning "land of drizzle". This outdated nickname for São Paulo seems more appropriate for the UK, than here in the subtropics, where rain tends to fall in short, torrential bursts.
Yet the name is appropriate for Riviera (Avenida Paulista 2584), a bar fuelled by nostalgia. Opened at the end of last year, it sits on the site of a notorious city nightspot of the same name. The much-loved original, founded in 1949, was particularly popular with dissidents during Brazil's military dictatorship in the late 60s and 70s, and with artists and students in the years that followed. Now, after being closed for over a decade, it's been resurrected by Brazil's most famous chef, Alex Atala, alongside nightlife entrepreneur Facundo Guerra.
Built around a bright-red central bar, its industrial steel-and-concrete fittings mix with more homely features, including a bookshelf deliberately filled with publications that would have been banned during the dictatorship. The exterior, however, has hardly changed. It sits besides a gritty junction of traffic-clogged Avenida Paulista, the city's business hub, behind a wall of glass bricks and flagged by a retro neon sign of a palm tree (think Tom Cruise's Cocktail). That's the first rule of São Paulo: looks can be deceptive. Amid the infinite concrete, I find most of the good places are unremarkable from the outside – perhaps deliberately so. After a day on my feet exploring downtown, mostly on foot, I feel I've earned my Terra da Garoa. It tastes a bit like a caipirinha (Brazil's famously simple cocktail of cachaça, lime, sugar and ice), with a new dimension coming from ginger, orange honey, mint and lemongrass. The result is dangerously smooth. I think back to the advice given to me by a friend in the city. "Two caipirinhas is a great idea. Three seems like a good idea at the time. Four is never a good idea."
It's fair to say that cachaça – made from sugar cane and often exceeding 40% alcohol – has a reputation. Tourists may lust after the idea of a "caipi" on Rio's Copacabana beach, but many locals would pass. A young, affluent Brazilian is more likely to order a caipiroska at a bar (the same as a caipirinha, but with vodka). Cachaça is traditionally considered harsh, unsophisticated and a cheap way to get drunk fast.
But there is also another side to it (why else would Riviera be championing it?). Cheap paint-stripper cachaça, known as pinga, exists at one end of the spectrum but at the other is something quite different: aged in oak barrels and going for 500 reais (£130) a bottle.
To find out more, I arrange to meet Josimar Melo, one of the country's leading food and drink critics, and Mauricio Maia, the equivalent of a cachaça sommelier and founder of the O Cachacier blog. We meet for dinner at Bar Da Dona Onça (Avenida Ipiranga 200), another place I probably would have walked past. It's hidden at the base of the wave-like Copan building, a famous 1950s Oscar Niemeyer creation, and carries 30 brands of cachaça. We order Cachaça da Laje – from a town in São Paulo state. It's served neat, in shot glasses, to be enjoyed slowly alongside the home-style food. The first taste is mind-blowing to a newcomer. My throat burns and lips tingle but, after that, a slight sweetness comes through. I sip gingerly as Mauricio regales me with the facts. There are 4,000 brands of cachaça recognised officially by the government but around 40,000 producers. Around 1.2bn litres is made annually, yet only 1% is exported.
"There needs to be a change of mindset," adds Josimar. "For a special occasion, the upper classes still reach for a whisky or French cognac. Just as the city's best restaurants were always French or Italian." But the food market is changing. The aforementioned Atala – whose flagship restaurant, D.O.M is voted among the world's best – is famed for his inventive use of Brazilian ingredients. And why have a French dinner in São Paulo when you can have something you've never tried before, such as Amazonian fish ribs? So that is what I order. They look just like their pork equivalent, if not bigger, with fleshy white meat falling off the monstrous, inch-thick bones.
Could cachaça be on the brink of a similar breakthrough? The Ypióca brand – which dates to 1846 – was bought in 2012 by one of the world's leading alcohol groups, Diageo. And, in a crucial move for the export industry, the US now recognises cachaça as a spirit in its own right, not just "Brazilian rum". This means that just as bourbon can only be produced in the US, cachaça can only come from Brazil.
I need to know where to go to get the best cachaças and, earlier in the day, I got a not-so-subtle clue on the menu in a bar in Vila Madalena, the city's upmarket arty area. One full page was dedicated to cachaças from Minas Gerais, after which half a page was given to the rest of the country. If I really want to get to know cachaça, it seems I need to go to Brazil's second most populous state, just north of São Paulo.
Minas Gerais
The region of Minas Gerais, which translates as "general mines", was founded during the 17th century by colonists searching for gold. Its rugged landscape is home to beautiful colonial towns, including Unesco-listed Ouro Preto – famed for its baroque churches. Mauricio and Josimar tell me the best-quality cachaça comes from Salinas, in the state's far north, but I'm keen to check out the places on the edge of Belo Horizonte, the state capital and one of the World Cup host cities (where England play against Costa Rica on 24 June). BH, as it is known (pronounced Bay-ah-ga), strikes me as a good base for a few days. There's a provincial feel that comes from being an underdog, but it also feels more manageable than São Paulo. Downtown is walkable and dotted with interesting architecture (including more Niemeyer), plenty of lively places to eat and drink in the Savassi district, and a huge, palm-dotted park with a boating lake. Renowned as the cidade dos bares (city of bars), there is also no shortage of places for sampling the local firewater.
But it is in the surrounding countryside that you find the alambiques: the artisanal distilleries the state is famed for. I've been tipped off about an organic one called Germana, 75km south-east of the city. Amid banana plantations and luminous grass, a dirt track leads to an isolated house covered in vines.
I'm greeted by the third-generation owner, Walter, who is in his 60s and limping slightly after being trodden on by a horse. He shows me straight into the kitchen (the Mineros' way) where he's laid out a spread of fresh bread, milky white cheese, cake, coffee and juice. He warms the cheese on the open flames of the old iron stove and shows me sepia photos of his grandmother, who started cachaça production here 100 years ago. Walter's father would carry it, on the back of donkeys, to an English mining company, where he'd exchange it for kerosene and soap. The 65km journey took three days.
At Germana, everything is still done by hand, from filling the bottles to putting on the labels. Each bottle is wrapped in what looks like straw and Walter tells me how a patronising Englishman once turned his nose up at this. "It's such a shame they are cutting down the Atlantic rainforest so wastefully," he had said, dismissively. "But what he didn't know is it's banana leaf!" recalls Walter, chuckling. "The leaves are leftover rubbish that would be thrown away. This is our bubble wrap! Ha ha ha!"
Cachaça differs from rum by being distilled from fresh sugarcane, instead of molasses. Walter takes us on a tour – showing off the copper alambiques – to a little wooden bar in the cellar, where he pours instantly dizzying samples. "I think there will be a cachaça boom soon," he says, adding that he has had interest from foreign investors. Would he sell? His face falls for a second, then he laughs. "What can I say? I just want it to carry on … But I don't know if my sons will want to do it."
Vale Verde, also in Minas Gerais and 40km from BH, is an altogether different sort of alambique, set in landscaped gardens as a form of natural amusement park. It's what happens when a prosperous businessman builds a park to celebrate his three loves: orchids, tropical birds, cachaça, and then throws in some zipwires and swan-shaped pedalos for good measure. The alambique here has long prided itself on using aged oak casks, giving the spirit a golden colour and more flavour.
But the main attraction has to be the museum, which is a room packed, floor-to-ceiling, with hundreds of bottles of the stuff. One translates as mother-in-law pacifier; another, standing on a plinth of its own, is a rare specimen with a very young Pelé on the front – one of only five left after Pelé's legal team ordered the rest to be destroyed.
Rio de Janeiro state
All the while, I am piecing together cachaça's history. I learn about the spirit's early years, when it was produced by slaves; and how cachaça also became a tool of resistance, pre-independence. If you were against the crown, you would drink it at society receptions, instead of port or Madeira. When the King banned it, production went underground, much like gin in England.
An apt place to wind up the cachaça trail is Paraty, a postcard-pretty colonial town on the Atlantic coast and a popular stop-off between São Paulo and Rio. The town was once so synonymous with the production of cachaça that people would ask for a glass of parati.
I visit a few alambiques in the surrounding countryside, dotted between waterfalls and streams, and meet two more local cachaça enthusiasts. Yara Castro Roberts – a chef originally from Minas Gerais – runs a cookery school here with her husband, Richard. As Richard mixes caipirinhas, Yara tells me tales of the cocktail's unglamorous origins as a flu remedy: cachaça, lemon and sugar, served hot. It was only when it was "reimagined" with ice – allegedly at a São Paulo bar in the 1950s – that a classic was born. I feel like I have got an entire history of Brazil through one spirit. "That's true!" she cries. "Cachaça is interlinked with our history, our way of life. We just need to get over the stigma."
Will the World Cup be that catalyst? It can only help. If Brazilians usually get through over a billion litres of the stuff during a normal year, the quantity consumed during the competition – with help from fans there and abroad – could push this year's figures into a new league.
Getting there
The trip was provided by Real World Holidays (0113 262 5329, realworldholidays.co.uk/brazil), which has a 10-day trip to São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio for £1,295pp, including hotels, transport, internal (but not international) flights, guides and tours. Flights were provided by TAP Portugual (0845 601 0932, flytap.com), which flies from London to Rio via Lisbon from £650 return including taxes.
Further information
For details on holidays to Brazil go to visitbrasil.com
