In my previous article, I discussed some of the technical and production considerations crucial to making liqueurs. Liqueurs are challenging to master; no wonder all those monks dedicated their lives to the practice.
Here, I want to shift our perspective to the cultural positioning of liqueur because it has one of the longest and most significant histories among all categories of spirit regularly consumed today.
That’s not to say whiskey and gin don’t have rich histories. However, I’d argue that specific liqueurs have cultural connotations that have remained more or less intact—and that isn’t necessarily the case for other spirits, particularly when it comes to consumption rituals. (It’s hard to imagine people in Jack Daniel’s day hounding their local bottle shops to see whether any allocated bourbons had come in, or soldiers in William III’s army expressing a preference for elderflower or classic tonic to be served with their gin.)
The Roots of Liqueur Making
There’s a case to be made that liqueur’s association with medicine and ceremony for much of human history is responsible for its lasting cultural status today. Crudely distilled beverages have been associated with alchemy and medicine since ancient times; infusing herbs into alcohol was a logical evolution. Documented cases of using alcoholic drinks for herbal extracts in classical pharmacy date to the first century CE. Europe has used liqueurs medicinally for at least five centuries.
Until recently, people couldn’t just pop down to the Rite Aid to pick up some ibuprofen when they felt a headache coming on. What people did have, historically, was the natural flora that surrounded them. So, they developed health care that would now be considered “alternative,” revolving around herbs and their extracts. Today, we can sort the historical use of liqueurs into at least five categories or contexts:
- pharmaceutical, as described above
- naturopathic herbalism, an Old World philosophy of preventative health care—as with regional bitters developed to aid digestion
- ethnomedicine, homemade and traditional herbal medicines passed down through the generations, as with the herberos of eastern Spain
- spas and health resorts
- monastic tradition
After centuries of continued development of liqueurs throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance saw important advances in distilling technology, refining some of the systems that had been used. Concurrently, European countries were sending representatives all over the world; via colonialism, they discovered and sent back spices and ingredients that were new to Europeans.
However, as it did in so many other fields, the Industrial Revolution forever turned the page. That era introduced mass production, which opened opportunities for wider dissemination of regional liqueur traditions.
Modern Liqueur: The Case of Dubonnet
Quinine-based drinks offer an important study in how liqueurs grew in use and popularity.
The best-known drink that includes quinine is tonic, first made commercially in 1858 but consumed by colonists and soldiers much earlier than that; it was the indigenous Quechua people of South America who showed the Spanish quinine’s medicinal value and how to prepare it. The Spanish were using the cinchona bark medicinally as early as the 17th century—they used quinine as a prophylactic and antimalarial, and it became invaluable to European troops during the colonial era.
Dubonnet, a French liqueur and aperitif first sold in 1846, belongs to a subcategory called quinaquina because of its key ingredient—quinine. In the 1830s, the French government appealed to the public for a more palatable product that still contained quinine so that troops would more readily take it. Parisian chemist Joseph Dubonnet was the first to successfully present an improved version—a wine fortified with quinine liqueur.
French soldiers abroad enjoyed it so much that they continued to drink it after coming home, eventually turning this medicine into the aperitif du jour for the French and then other Europeans, including—a century later—Queen Elizabeth II, who preferred her Dubonnet in a cocktail of two parts to one part gin, stirred and served with a lemon peel.
Aperitivo and the Importance of Ritual
As with wines, Old World liqueurs from Italy, France, and Spain have an outsized influence on our view of the entire category. What often sets Italian aperitivo apart from, say, single-malt whiskey is that the bitter, red drink is married to consumption rituals that have been preserved—and are still practiced in 2023.
Even if you’ve never set foot on the Piazza del Duomo in the heart of Milan’s city center, you likely have an association between the spritz and the Italian tradition of the aperitivo hour—even if the bubbly beverage was invented in Veneto and then diffused throughout the rest of the country and around the globe. The Piazza del Duomo is home to Campari’s Camparino bar and, right above it on the second floor, the Terrazza Aperol—two of the world’s biggest brands of red aperitivo, owned by the same company, with their own bars in the same square. Many consider this to be a mecca for aperitivo; you can find great aperitivo hours offered by bars throughout Italy’s largest northern city.
“Aperitivo” refers both to the style of drink well as the occasion during which it is consumed. Usually before lunch or dinner, aperitivo allows Italians to break from work and meet with others to share a quick drink and some small bites of food. Because people typically enjoy aperitivo drinks during the daytime, they are all relatively low in alcohol and easy to whip up, said to foster both good conversation and a strong appetite. Think spritzes, Americanos, negronis, and the bicicletta—a three-part cocktail that combines dry white wine, bitter red aperitivo, and soda water in different proportions. Most aperitivo cocktails follow that kind of simple format: two or three parts that mix well together, likely elements that are light, bitter, flavorful, or bubbly, all served in a sizable glass filled to the brim with ice and garnished with a slice of fresh fruit.
Light, informal snacks often accompany the cocktails in Italy—grilled vegetables, crusty bread, crostini, cheeses, cured meats, olives, mixed salads, and so on. The point of the food is not to satiate you but to break your hunger, allowing you to relax and socialize with friends and neighbors before you settle down to a meal. When I lived in Milan, I regularly met friends for aperitivo in different bars around the city. You’d pay for a drink—typically discounted from their normal price to some deliriously cheap number—and included in that purchase was access to a small buffet of food set up on the other side of the bar. The closest approximation to Italian aperitivo in North America is happy hour, and while there are similarities, the idea of having an open buffet of freshly made food in bars across this country seems unimaginable. For Italians, it’s a rite.
Toward an American Aperitivo
Broadly, aperitivo culture has not quite found the same success in North America, but the rising interest in some of its essential ingredients—red aperitivo, vermouth, and amaro—is notable. With American distilleries producing faithful iterations across the country now, there has been a distinct shift in the attention paid to those liqueurs—but not everyone is suddenly familiar with this relatively foreign category.
“I think in a certain sense there was some knowledge and something to base [it] on, but it was still very niche,” says Aaron Sing Fox, cofounder of Forthave Spirits, a botanicals-focused distillery in Brooklyn, New York, whose products include a red aperitivo, multiple amari, and coffee liqueur.
Sing Fox and business partner Daniel de la Nuez began experimenting with liqueur production about 2012. Sing Fox had lived in Paris, studying painting and working in wine shops. While there, he became more interested in European liqueurs; de la Nuez, meanwhile, had split his childhood between New York and Spain.
It wasn’t until 2016 that they produced a commercial botanical liqueur in earnest. When they began selling their spirits, the buyers they approached gave them a positive reception, Sing Fox says, but it wasn’t as if aperitivo was even approaching a household concept back then. “If we went and did just a tasting in a store, it was absolutely the case that many people said, ‘What is amaro? What is the category of this that we’re doing? And what do we do with it?’”
Robert Simonson of The New York Times writes that “the aperitivo hour—which lasts a few hours, really, from late afternoon to early evening—is as intrinsic to Milan life as fashion and The Last Supper.” We can extrapolate that the Milanese grow up with aperitivo, understanding inherently how and when to prepare it. They know the basic roster of simple, breezy concoctions that make up aperitivo, and they also know that these cocktails are far from an exact science, often thrown together without a jigger in sight. Their assembly requires speed rather than precision, as a bartender can expect to be serving a sudden horde of thirsty people all leaving the office about the same time.
Americans don’t have that same intrinsic knowledge. Broadly, while we might be familiar with aperitivo and aperitifs—and possibly the exact negroni variation we like best—we tend to be less confident straying outside the narrow strictures of cocktail recipes (probably found online). It’s a pity, as it goes against one of the core tenets of aperitivo—informality.
I see a thirst all over, however, for drinking experiences such as apéro and aperitivo, featuring beverages that are light, bubbly, and flavorful, with just enough bite to keep them interesting. I think that’s part of the reason hard seltzers and canned cocktails have become so popular, as many people came to the realization that beer wasn’t their preference for drinking on the lake.
Whether or not we ever see aperitivo find more traction here remains to be seen. Yet with the growth of American-made amari—and a potential turn away from $17 cocktails and back to happy hours—there may be no more fertile time than now for liqueur to find a more everyday place in American life.