A Vintage Pisco Punch Story

Once in the hands of Duncan Nicol it was translated, as by consecration
in the name of a divinity more benevolent than all others, into Pisco
punch, the wonder and glory of San Francisco's heady youth, the balm
and solace of fevered generations, a drink so endearing and inspired
that although its prototype has vanished, its legend lingers on, one
with the Grail, the unicorn, and the music of the spheres…

He meant it, too, about the two drinks to a customer. If a favored
patron like Fire Chief Scannell or James Flood, the Nevada bonanza king
who was himself once a saloonkeeper of note (both of them were known
tosspots), wanted more, he could walk around the block, thus qualifying
as a new customer. When millionaire John Mackay, perhaps the richest
man in America at the time, wanted a third, he like everyone else raked
his silk hat off the stag-horn rack, walked demurely around the block,
and returned to get if. Nobody took liberties with Nicol…

Pisco came into the fullest flowering of its celebrity, became a generic term, and entered the local language. A writer in the California Alta
elegantly referred to a drunken character as “more than piscoed.” Neill
C. Wilson, the western historian, coined the simile “as comfortable as
a Pisco jag.”