London Calling
London Calling is a gin sour with fino sherry in it, and the sherry is doing the job salt does in cooking. Fifteen millilitres is not enough to taste as sherry. It is enough to dry the finish, deepen the middle and make the lemon read sharper than it otherwise would. It is credited to Chris Jepson, who built it at MASH in London in 2002, and named for the Clash record. That date matters: it is roughly a decade ahead of the point at which fino became a fashionable thing to have behind a bar, and the drink is routinely named as one of the things that started the shift. The result is a sour with its collar up. Dry, mineral and considerably more serious than a gin sour has any obligation to be, and the sort of drink to put in front of someone who has told you they do not like sherry, without mentioning what is in it.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Orange Twist
Ingredients
40ml
London Dry, and the name is not a coincidence. Juniper is what the fino's salt has to push against, and a soft contemporary gin leaves the drink tasting mostly of sherry and lemon.
15ml
Fresh and fridge-cold, in the smallest bottle you can buy. A week open and the saline brightness has gone, which removes the only reason the recipe exists.
15ml
Fifteen millilitres, which is short for a sour. The fino brings acidity of its own, and a full sour measure of lemon on top of it makes the drink thin and sharp.
10ml
Ten millilitres and no more. This is meant to run dry, and the usual sour balance of equal sugar and citrus would round off exactly the edge the sherry is there to supply.
2 dashes
Two dashes bridging wine and juniper. Orange peel is the one aromatic that reads clearly against both, which is why it is here rather than Angostura.
Instructions
Add the gin, fino, lemon juice, simple syrup and orange bitters to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe.
Express an orange twist over the surface and drop it in.
Expert Tip
The fino has to be fresh, and this is the drink that will punish you for ignoring that. A bottle open for a week has already lost the saline brightness the recipe is built on, and what is left tastes flat and faintly of nuts. Buy half bottles, keep them in the fridge, and treat an open fino like an open white wine, because that is what it is. Do not increase the measure. Fifteen millilitres is seasoning; at thirty the sherry stops seasoning and starts being the drink, and the gin has nothing left to do. Keep the syrup short. Ten millilitres against fifteen of lemon runs deliberately dry, and that dryness is the point of the whole thing.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Chris Jepson built the drink at MASH in London in 2002 and named it for the Clash album, which was a fair thing to do given what it is: a London gin, a London bar and a drink that could not really have come from anywhere else.
Its significance is chronological. In 2002 fino sherry was not a cocktail ingredient in any general sense; it was a wine that Spanish restaurants sold and almost nobody else stocked. The drink is regularly credited with being among the first modern classics to change that, and the sherry revival that followed a decade later found the argument already made.
Sherry as Seasoning
The useful way to think about the fino here is not as an ingredient but as a technique. Fifteen millilitres in a drink of roughly eighty is a seasoning measure, and it behaves like one.
Fino gets its salinity from flor, the layer of yeast it ages under, and from the coastal cellars it ages in. What that salinity does in a sour is exactly what a pinch of salt does in food: it does not add a flavour anyone can name, it makes the other flavours louder. The lemon reads sharper, the juniper reads greener, and the finish dries out. Take the fino out and what remains is a perfectly ordinary gin sour, which is the best demonstration of the point available.
Why It Runs Dry
Ten millilitres of syrup against fifteen of lemon is a long way short of the sour family's usual balance, and the shortfall is deliberate.
A conventional gin sour uses sugar to round the lemon off. This one uses the fino instead, which adds body and depth without adding sweetness. Push the syrup up to fifteen and the drink becomes pleasant and unremarkable: the sherry's mineral edge gets buried under sugar and the whole reason for its presence disappears.
What It Started
The drink turned out to be sturdy enough to riff on, which is a better measure of a modern classic than how often it gets ordered. Dandelyan's Banana Calling keeps the gin, fino and lemon frame and threads banana liqueur through it, and the joke in the name only works because the original is well enough known to be referenced.
Very few drinks from the 2000s have produced descendants at all.
How to Serve It
Shaken hard, double strained into a chilled coupe, orange twist expressed over the surface. Orange rather than lemon: there is already lemon in the glass, and the orange oil gives the nose a note the palate does not repeat.
Serve it cold and early, before food. It is an aperitif with a wine bar's manners rather than a cocktail bar's.
The Spirit
GinA flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who created London Calling?
It is credited to Chris Jepson, who built it at MASH in London in 2002 and named it for the Clash album. It is regularly listed among the drinks that brought fino sherry back behind cocktail bars.
What does the fino sherry do?
It seasons. Fifteen millilitres is too small a measure to taste as sherry, but its salinity makes the lemon sharper, the juniper greener and the finish drier, in the way a pinch of salt works in cooking rather than as a flavour of its own.
Can I use a different sherry?
Manzanilla is the closest substitute and slightly saltier still. Amontillado and oloroso are nuttier and heavier, and both turn the drink into something rounder that loses the mineral edge, so treat them as variations rather than swaps.
Why is the drink so dry?
The syrup is deliberately short: ten millilitres against fifteen of lemon, where a conventional sour would match them. The fino supplies the body that sugar usually would, and adding more syrup buries the salinity the recipe is built around.
Master the Techniques
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Banana Calling
The Banana Calling is Dandelyan’s tribute act. Cameron Attfield built it on London’s South Bank in August 2018, during the bar’s final season as the world’s number one, as a house riff on Chris Jepson’s London Calling: gin, fino sherry and lemon, with banana liqueur threaded through the seams. The name declares the lineage and the banana declares almost nothing, which is the trick. Ten millilitres against forty of gin is seasoning arithmetic rather than a flavour statement. The liqueur’s cooked fruit rounds the sour’s middle while the fino’s salinity keeps the sweetness honest, and the two low notes merge into something neither bottle predicts on its own. The banana is barely findable without the name to point at it, and that restraint is the whole design. It is the modern school in miniature: a great bar honouring a great drink by changing ten millilitres and putting the credit in the title.
Gimlet
The Gimlet is the Royal Navy in a coupe. In 1867 the Merchant Shipping Act made lime rations compulsory aboard British ships, and in the same year Lauchlin Rose of Leith patented a way of preserving lime juice in sugar without a drop of alcohol. Rose's Lime Cordial went to sea, the officers' gin went into it, and somewhere between Portsmouth and Bombay the Gimlet was born. The defining decision is the cordial. A true Gimlet is gin and lime cordial and nothing else, and its character is exactly the cooked, marmalade-edged lime that preservation produces: smooth, rounded and faintly nostalgic, closer to silk than to citrus. Fresh lime and sugar make a bright and blameless drink, but they make a different one, and the traditional position is that the cordial version is the Gimlet and the fresh version is its modern variation. Proportions are the drinker's prerogative in the naval spirit. The classic pour ran as heavy as half and half; the modern palate prefers the drier three to one given here.
White Negroni
The White Negroni came out of an improvisation. Wayne Collins, a British bartender demonstrating at VinExpo in Bordeaux in 2001, was asked to work with French products and did not have Campari or sweet vermouth to hand. He rebuilt the Negroni from what was available: Suze in place of the Campari, Lillet Blanc in place of the vermouth, gin unchanged. It is a translation rather than a substitution. Suze is bitter from gentian root, which is earthy and vegetal where Campari is bitter orange, and Lillet answers with honeyed citrus and a touch of quinine where sweet vermouth brought weight and spice. The structure survives intact and every flavour in it changes. What you get is paler, drier and stranger than the original, and it has done more than anything else to put Suze on back bars outside France. Plenty of people prefer it to a Negroni. The argument is worth having with one of each in front of you.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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