I don't want to be pedantic, but i think i heard (and possibly, hearing this prompted me to notice perhaps more by a placebo effect than anything else), that Mezcal (and in general tequila?) are best enjoyed without ice and at room temperature. Now, old-fashioned have always been cooled, but maybe a cocktail so centered on the quality of our agave spirit should be akin to a ti-punch for agricole... or perhaps i am missing the whole point here. But there is a gap at least I would say with "ti-punch" room temperature cocktails that let your mezcal shine. Whether through lime juice as in the rum-one or a-la-old-fashioned i'm too ignorant to decide.
Sir this stuff is a masterpiece. The way the fernet layer hits you asynchronically after the first instant of creme de cassis, and then you ask yourself "what was in the cocktail" and suddenly you find a lingering peach in your aftertaste ... great. I used peachthree and since i was warned about its sweetness i used 20ml of it instead of your 30ml. But it's a damn five star plus nonetheless. And so unusual!
Well done, I'd personally cut the strawberry syrup by a half or follow conservatively the indication for just a spoon of falernum - skipping both options produce a nice sweet cocktail that betrays the nice complexity of your cocktail - but a great use of rum fire indeed!
Somewhere somehow there is a place for blood orange juice in this beauty
Just so you know, I've tried mine with an italian vermouth, cinzano 1757 . Pretty good.
The point is however that the type of vermouth i see suggested is not the antica formula described in your Review - which made me think that you would rather favour "Vermouth Rosso alla Vaniglia" as a difford' s category - I'm risking the comment just because maybe you thought the cocktail this way and you would have liked the other drinkers to favor that -
I by the way gave 4 start to the standard red italian vermouth version (the only one i could try!).
Also, sometimes people search through available ingredient and the type of vermouth you specified is rarer, making this nice cocktail finish wrongly down the list for lack of ingredients.... Antica seems to me to be more common, and standard red vermouth such as my cinzano even more common...
So... is the original intended with the vanilla flavour of Antica or no?
Perhaps my favourite cocktail with zzzzzzzzfz - with 45 ml of it is bound to give a punch. I like to think that mr Difford had already appreciated 3 or 4 of these before sharing the recipe. I already had one so I had to doublecheck that zzzzzzzzfz was really there