The Spirits #142: The Negroni

It being Negroni Week

Sep 20, 2024

Running low on booze? Visit the SPIRITS STORE. This week you will find 20% off the Negroni bundle - that’s gin, Italian vermouth, Pic-Amar for £64.76 w/ free P&P. Simply follow the link and enter the code NEGRONI20RICHARD when you check out.

CLICK HERE FOR BOOOOOZE

~ THE NEGRONI ~

30ml gin
20ml Italian vermouth
20ml Campari

Fill a rocks glass with large ice. Carefully measure in the spirits and stir patiently in the glass. Garnish with citrus - orange is customary - and make sure you have plenty of salty snacks on hand; olives, toasted almonds, tarelli biscuits, Fonzies crisps, prosciutto, that sort of thing.

Some Negroni notes:

1) Sacriliciously, I’ve messed with the equal parts Negroni formula that is one of the cornerstones of the cocktail’s success. I have come to prefer just a tot of extra gin.

2) Pictured: a Negroni I had at Il Capri hotel just prior to sundown a couple of ~~lifetimes~~ weeks ago. Sigh. The bartender chose to garnish it with star anise as opposed to the customary citrus which just goes to show that Italians are not such sticklers for tradition as we often assume.

3) Your fancier bartenders - including the one at Il Capri - will tend to stir their Negronis in a mixing vessel with cubed ice before pouring it into a separate drinking glass containing fresh ice. The idea here is control. You stir the cocktail for as long as it takes to acheive optimal dilution. Then when you pour the liquid into the glass, it’s already chilled, which slows down the melting of the ice in the glass (the more so when it’s a single large cube, the even more so when it’s a sphere), ensuring an optimally chilled and diluted Negroni. It also adds an extra element of theatre and a patina of science that makes customers feel happier about handing over €18. When at home, I just usually knock these things back quite quickly, so I’m happy with the more elementary glass build.

4) Small Italy-related aside. In Ischia and Capri, there were lots of Negronis, Americanos, Aperol Spritzes and Limoncello Spritzes on the menus, as I expected. But the drink that seemed to have colonisd the most menu real estate since my last visit to Italy was… the Hugo Spritz, the northern Italian elderflower-scented variant on the Spritz. See my exhaustive guide to elderflower liqueur for the recipe.

Remember to listen to music… And see you below the line.

🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🛒 Running low on booze? Visit the SPIRITS STORE.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.

I HAVE generally avoided doing “straight” versions of the classics on The Spirits so far. The idea being, you probably already know how to make a Negroni by now. You’re probably be more interested in a little variant or tweak.

This is all well and good. Quite often, I too find myself pouring a little tot of apricot liqueur or creme de cacao into a basic build. Or subbing out the Campari for, ooh, Khoosh bitters or Select. Or switching the gin for tequila for a Rosita or funky Jamaican rum for a Kingston Negroni. Or using a rosemary garnish for a herbal Negroni, or adding olive brine to make it a Dirty Negroni, or muddling a strawberry in there somewhere. And have you ever tried a tot of absinthe in there? Apparently this is called a Quill.

Oh but this might blow your mind. You can switch out the gin for sparkling wine. That’s a Negroni. Sbagliato. With prosecco in it. And may I also bring Rich Woods’s Nutella Negroni to your attention?

All very fine ways of passing the time, to be sure. But sometimes - in fact, most of the time - I just want a no-fuss Negroni. Just as I need to listen to actual Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell or Beatles from time to time as opposed to people inspired by them. A Negroni where the juniper of the gin is bitter and sharp, the vermouth is rich and comforting and the Campari lends a modernist tang to the thing. I’m fairly brand agnostic on all of these elements, including the Campari by the way: Luxardo Rosso, Select, Pic-Amar, all good. I’m not even above tweaking the ratios, as above. But even these minor variants sometimes seem a little much. Basic Bitch Negroni of Beefeater, Marini Rosso and Campari does the job perfectly well, I find.

But it should be those three elements. Ideally at sundown. Ideally in company. Ideally with a table full of things to nibble on. And somehow, every time, it’s a surprising how delicious it tastes.

PLAYLIST

It only seems appropriate to re-plug my excellent Italia playlist.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

I finished The Story of a New Name, the second part of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. All I can say is, after the scene in that factory towards the end, I don’t think I can ever eat mortadella again - Anthony Bourdain be damned. But seriously, what a novel, everything else is so pale and meek in comparison.

I loved this homage to The World’s Best Bar by David Coggins. Bet you can’t guess where it is. (The Contender)

This interview w/ the wine writer Hannah Crosbie a.k.a. “the Nigella of Wine” caught my eye (Punch). “You sort of think of trad wine writers as, like, very upper class, upper middle class. People who speak in a certain way, which is not [the person] the consumer recognizes—which is who you’re relying on to buy your wine. That never made sense for me. I think that my new hot take for the autumn is that the wine industry cannot complain about young people not buying wine when they’re not selling it to young people.” I subsequently enjoyed catching up w/ her funny and well-informed wine columns for the (Evening Standard)

…Which is no more! Gosh. There was a time when every Londoner had an opinion on that newspaper. Having spent 12 happy years of my career there (2003-2015) and written on and off for them since (excepting the ridiculous period when George Osborne was editor…) I have more opinions than most. But I think we could all agree that a city with a population the size of Portugal or Sweden should really be able to support its own dedicated newspaper. Anyway, I enjoyed Zoe Williams’s column on how things used to be at that insane place in the media’s last pre-internet glory days. (Guardian).

Oh and I highly recommend: How CocoMelon captures our children’s attention by Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker). I know this is a few months old but I was re-alerted to it by Ezra Klein’s excellent podcast conversation w/ Tolentino on the screen time, parenting, LSD and just about everything else.

Share The Spirits

OTHER BOTTLES YOU MIGHT ENJOY

🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🌻 Suze