Blood and Sand

Equal-parts Scotch, Cherry Heering, sweet vermouth, and orange juice — a 1922 Valentino film-named classic documented in The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930).

Blood and Sand takes its name from the 1922 silent film starring Rudolph Valentino — the Italian-born actor who was the most celebrated Hollywood star of the early 1920s — as Juan Gallardo, a Spanish bullfighter who rises to fame before his tragic end. The film, adapted from Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1908 novel, was a commercial sensation and one of the defining productions of Valentino's brief career before his death in 1926 at age 31. The cocktail naming was characteristic of the Jazz Age practice of honoring popular films, performers, and cultural phenomena with drinks that captured the public imagination. The formula — equal parts Scotch whisky, Cherry Heering (the Danish cherry liqueur produced by Peter Heering in Copenhagen since 1818), sweet vermouth, and fresh orange juice — is one of the most unusual in the Scotch cocktail canon: the equal-parts structure places fruit juice alongside a classic stirred-cocktail framework in a way that produces a drink of exceptional sweetness and fruit-forward complexity quite unlike any other Scotch preparation. Harry Craddock documented the recipe in The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930). The craft cocktail revival's rediscovery of Blood and Sand has established it as one of the most interesting and underappreciated pre-Prohibition Scotch classics.