Chancellor

An elegant stirred Scotch cocktail with the dry complexity of vermouth and the deep, jammy richness of ruby port -- statesmanlike, composed, and quietly powerful.

The Chancellor is a stirred Scotch cocktail combining Scotch whisky with dry vermouth, port wine, and Peychaud's Bitters whose formula creates a distinctly British-influenced preparation drawing on both Scottish distilling and Portuguese fortified wine traditions. The recipe was noted in William Tarling's Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937), the compendium produced by the head bartender of the Café Royal on Regent Street in London — one of the most celebrated café-restaurants in the city's history, frequented by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Aesthetic movement's leading figures in the 1890s. A subsequent version was documented by Stanley M. Jones in his Jones' Complete Barguide (1977). The combination of Scotch and port has a long history in British drinking culture: Scottish and Portuguese commercial relationships were cemented through the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which gave Portuguese wines preferential tariff treatment in Britain and established the port trade's dominance in the British market for generations. Peychaud's Bitters, the distinctly New Orleanian aromatic bitters created by Antoine Amédée Peychaud from the 1830s onward, contributes the Chancellor's most distinctive flavor element — its floral, slightly anise-tinged bitterness creating an unexpected New Orleans inflection in an otherwise British preparation.