Top Five in Five #3: Boozy Bottles

This is the third installment in my five-week series of mindful gift ideas for the food lovers on your holiday gift list.

For those on your list who imbibe, you can rarely go wrong with a nice bottle of cheer. Increasingly it is becoming easier to find products made locally, artisanally, or with organic ingredients (and sometimes all three!). I'm not a sommelier or drinks expert, so I'm not going to offer too many specific brands here. Rather, here are five categories and a few suggestions.

Cider
I'm a cider-lover. And with the number of orchards in south-western Quebec, it's no surprise that there are lots of cider choices. One of my favorites that is widely available is Degel by La Face Cachée de la Pomme in Hemmingford, but see what your local SAQ or grocer has to offer. Also, Le Domaine Steinbach in Ile D'Orleans produces five organic ciders, including an ice cider. You can order their product online. In Ontario, see if you can find County Cider products in your area.

Mead or Honeywine
Like cider, mead in Quebec is sold as an alternative to wine rather than beer. There are lots of small producers in the Eastern Townships, Montérégie and up north. A few varieties are sold at the SAQ, including four organic products sold under the Forest label from Ruchers des Framboisiers in the Gaspe.

Beer
We're spoiled for choice with hundreds of microbrews in the Montreal region. My suggestions is to take a trip to a local shop that sells a wide selection of microbrews and put your own tasting-pack together as a gift. My brother did this last year and we enjoyed trying out the different brews. One brew of note for locavores is Rur'Ale, produced in St-Polycarpe using completely local ingredients. Marché des Saveurs at Jean Talon Market, Fromagerie du Marché at Atwater Market, and Les Delires du Terroir on St-Hubert street, and the Metro grocery store on De L'Eglise in Verdun all have excellent selections of microbrews. In Quebec City, try Depanneur de la Rive. (If you have a favourite place to buy microbrews, I'd love to hear about it!)

Wine
Close to Montreal, Vignoble de Négondos is a small organic vineyard in Saint-Benoit-de Mirabel near Lachute, Qc. that produces some nice wines. You can purchase a bottle (or more) at the vineyard or at Fromagerie Yannick in the Marché de l'Ouest, DDO. The SAQ has started offering organic and eco-pratique wine choices. See what your local has to offer.

Liqueur
My first choice here would be a nice bottle of ice cider, which is only made using traditional methods in Quebec. As mentioned above, Le Domaine Steinbach in Ile D'Orleans offers an organic ice cider that you can order online. Other than that see what your local SAQ has to offer, either in ice cider or other Produits de Terroir. If you're in Quebec city, consider a special visit to the SAQ Terroirs d'ici in Le Chateau Frontenac.

Previous installments in this series were cookbook ideas and crafty catches.

Quebec Malt Beverage with Real Fruit Juice

I discovered these Muse fruit cocktail beverages during our recent heat wave in Montreal. I'm not generally a fan of alco-pops--they tend to be full of sugar and far too sweet for my taste--however these caught my eye because they had some interesting flavours and are made with real fruit juice. Although, exactly how much of the beverage comes from fruit juice, I'm not exactly certain. The drink also uses sugar and flavours.

Like most alco-pops sold in convenience stores in Quebec, Muse cocktails are malt-based. Made in Quebec, they come in three flavours: blood orange, pineapple and pomegranate. I decided to try one of each. Like other alco-pops they are very sweet. Straight out of the bottle, the blood orange cocktail reminded me very much of orange pop; and I found myself drinking it quickly like a pop. It had almost no discernible malt flavour and it was easy to forget that it was an alcoholic beverage. The pomegranate and pineapple cocktails were similar: very tasty, very sweet, and very smooth. Because they taste so much like pop, I would be very leery of having these out at a party with children around.

For my own palate, I found that serving the pomegranate or blood orange cocktail over ice and slightly diluted with club soda worked well to reduce the sweetness of the beverage and to resist the urge to devour the bottle in a matter of minutes. The cocktails would probably work really well in some punches as well.