The Aviation

The Aviation is a beautiful, slightly dangerous cocktail — beautiful because of its pale violet-grey color, dangerous because the ingredient that gives it that color will ruin the drink if you use a drop too much.

The build is a gin sour with two liqueurs doing delicate work: 2 oz gin, ½ oz fresh lemon juice, ½ oz maraschino liqueur, and a scant ¼ oz crème de violette. Shake hard over ice and strain into a chilled coupe. The maraschino brings a nutty, cherry-pit sweetness; the violette brings floral perfume and that remarkable sky-at-dusk color the drink is named for.

The violette is the whole risk. Too much and the Aviation turns soapy, perfumed in the way of a grandmother’s bathroom, and people who had a bad one never order it again. Treat it like a seasoning, not an ingredient — a quarter ounce at most, less if your bottle is potent. You want the suggestion of violets, the ghost of them, not a mouthful. Start light; you can always add a drop, but you cannot take it back.

Get it right and the Aviation is one of the most elegant gin drinks there is — tart and floral and faintly mysterious, the color alone enough to make a table go quiet when it arrives. It is a cocktail with a sense of occasion, a little vintage, a little theatrical, named for the early romance of flight when the whole idea of leaving the ground was still glamorous.

Make it when you want to impress without seeming to try, when the evening calls for something that looks like it was difficult even though it took ninety seconds. Just respect the violette, and it will reward you with the prettiest drink on the table.

Crème de violette is the one bottle that makes this drink possible — you can track down a bottle on Amazon.