I have a challenge for the wine trade—especially the Italian wine trade: Let’s blow up the spritz.
What do I mean? A big part of the current “wine crisis” we keep hearing about is that young people aren’t drinking much wine, but are going for cocktails instead—especially lower-alcohol ones.
The solution is right in front of our eyes: We need more—and more interesting—wine cocktails.
Let’s start with the much misunderstood spritz from my adopted home in northern Italy’s Veneto region.
The spritz is a traditionally simple wine sipper that’s been taken over by the Prosecco juggernaut with the wildly popular (but often cloyingly sweet, to my taste) Aperol spritz and fresher, more sophisticated versions like the elderflower-flavored Hugo spritz.
They’ve conquered the world and moved millions of cases of cheap Prosecco.
But, come on, we can and should do a lot better.
Taste aside, there’s an authenticity problem.
When we travel through a varied country like Italy where great wines can be found in each region, why would we drink the same generic Prosecco cocktail everywhere as far south as the Amalfi Coast, Puglia or Sicily?
In order to change things, we need to get back to the basics of the spritz, which originated in the first half of the 19th century, when Northern Italy was under Austrian rule. The Austrian occupiers found Italian wines too strong and would ask local bartenders in German to spritzen their drinks with water to dilute them.
Ask for a Spritz Bianco in Northern Italy today and you’ll get a wine glass containing chilled white wine (typically Pinot Grigio), half its volume in soda water, a few ice cubes and a lemon slice. It’s much simpler and tastes cleaner and more refreshing than the popular neon-colored spritzes. Secondly, the wine character shines through.
“I always drink a Spritz Bianco especially in summer,” says Count Brandino Brandolini, 68, at Vistorta, his historic, organic red and white wine estate in northeastern Italy’s Friuli region. “It makes the wine easier to drink with less alcohol.”
In Southern Italy, there’s a long but unpublicized tradition of adding ice, soda and/or water (not to mention apricot or peach slices) to everyday wine in hot months.
But wine people generally treat such things as blasphemy. As a result, few regional winemakers and bartenders are working on original wine-cocktail recipes to help quench thirsts and promote their wines to new generations.
Angelo Silano is one of those exceptions who deserves attention.
Silano, 41, is an agronomist and enologist who worked in northern Italy and Beaujolais before returning home to his native Irpinia region of Campania to launch a tiny organic estate with his wife, Rosy, in 2010.
As the young couple began to produce their wines—including white single-vineyard Fiano bottlings and a classic-method Fiano sparkler—they had the clever idea of bringing a salumi-and-wine truck to the center of their village of Lapio (pop. 1,000) on weekend evenings.
The truck was a hit, and they now have a weekend aperitivo bar with a patio at their small, tidy winery on the edge of town. Back in the truck days, Silano listened to his customers and had a lightbulb moment. “The young people here would come and say, ‘I don’t like wine. I like cocktails.’ And they would ask for Campari or an Aperol Spritz.”
At one point, he recalls saying, “We are in Lapio. We need cocktails made with Fiano.”
So he invented his iced Fiano “Aperispritz,” made with Fiano wine, Fiano grape juice, a splash of red organic ginger ale and a pinch of cane sugar. Other cocktails followed, like his “Fiano lime” (substituting lime juice for the ginger ale) and “Irpinia Mule” (with ginger beer).
“Now we see the young people who started with cocktails, they drink Fiano,” he says, adding that the tilt to unadulterated wine starts at about age 25.
With each new Fiano cocktail, Silano used the strengths of the wine—vibrant acidity and the complex set of aromas of young Fiano—to craft balanced cocktails. “This was a way for them to appreciate wine and to learn to drink well,” he says.
Isn’t that what wine discovery is all about?
The day after I met Silano, I returned home to Verona in a summer swelter. I stopped in at my neighborhood osteria, noticing that it had added to its blackboard wine menu something called a “Verona Spritz.”
Caffè Monte Baldo’s energetic proprietor, Simone Vesentini, 40, a proud Veronese, explained that the creation is a way to promote a local historic product that’s fallen into decline: red, naturally sweet Recioto della Valpolicella, made from raisined grapes.
The recipe he developed with his staff includes equal parts Recioto and the local dry sparkler Durello, plus lemon soda over ice with a sprig of mint.
“We wanted to make a cocktail to revitalize Recioto,” he says. “With cocktails, we can enlarge the market beyond wine lovers by reaching a broader public.”
The pale red drink was light, refreshing and kept its wine character—weighing in at a low alcohol level of about 11 percent.
I’m a convert. It’s one thing to complain that younger drinkers don’t like wine. It’s another thing to get creative to do something about it. And we need more creativity.
So, I’m challenging somms, bartenders and producers: Let’s deconstruct the spritz and reimagine it everywhere, starting in aperitivo-crazy Italy.
Let’s blow it up in the name of wine.
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