Why a Bellini and not a Mojito?

Why a Bellini and not another drink, you may ask. I’m not sure why. Something to do with a summer I spent in Venice when I was 27 years old, and the fact that it is essentially a wine and fruit based drink. Could there be anything more pure? More natural? More of this earth? Grapes and fruit, the vine and the tree, the cluster and the single fruit. Need I say more? Perhaps…



I could have chosen the Mojito, for example, another favorite summer cocktail, from which fabulous and exotic stories have evolved, accompanied by a sound track which starts with Silvio Rodriguez and ends with Tito Puente, after your 3rd or 4th drink.

The Mojito is a gentle shake of white rum, sugar, sparkling water, fresh mint and lime. Our good friends Lila and Peter make the best Mojitos. On late Friday afternoons in summer we gather around the long table on their front porch, drinks in hand, and watch as the evening slowly gathers in around us. The children play in the park next door, and we can see them through the trees, hear their shouts, and after it gets dark and they’ve come back to the safety of home, the only sound we hear is the mystery of the wind shifting the leaves and branches through the trees.

I swear that I’ve never heard such trees and wind. And I’ve never felt so alive as when I sat on their porch last summer, and listened to the sounds of nature murmuring in the darkness, and sipped my Mojito out of their standard, jam-jar glasses.

I don’t think I could drink a Mojito from anything else now, and have it taste so good.

I could have written about the Mojito and my parent’s parties, Latin-American exiles, where everyone danced, and drank, and danced some more; of their collection of Cuban friends whom we knew while growing up in New Jersey, and the differences between what we know as ‘mint,’ and what the Cubans know as yerba buena, a more delicate flavor, often the subject of great, Cuban songs.

Yes, clearly I could have written about all these things in the form of the Mojito, but it is the Bellini that has captured my heart. I am not a drinker really. I sip. I take my time.