Boozehound - Jason Wilson [48]
Despite my lateness and bad shape, Branca was a consummate gentleman. “Fernet-Branca is a very intelligent drink,” he told me. “It’s not for the situation of getting drunk. It’s very healthy. Drink one or two glasses and you’ll feel fresh. You won’t have a hangover.” Ugh, yes, and if you do have a hangover, Fernet is probably the best hair-of-the-dog ever invented.
Fernet was created in 1845 by Branca’s great-great-grandfather, a self-taught herbalist. Besides settling digestion, it originally was used to treat such maladies as menstrual discomfort, colic, and cholera. It survived Prohibition in the United States because it was sold in pharmacies for medicinal purposes. “We never change the recipe,” Branca said. “It’s passed down from father to son. It was only given to me eight years ago.”
“Now, we go into a locked room,” Branca said. “Behind this door, there are secrets.” Indeed, entering into this cavernous old warehouse room was like walking into a medieval spice bazaar, an alchemist’s laboratory, a temple of holy herbs. Stacks of cinchona bark, pallets of bitter orange, vats of aloe and chamomile, and—to get a little biblical—myrrh. Fernet-Branca’s secret recipe has more than forty ingredients in all, including Chinese rhubarb, orrisroot, cardamom, gentian, marjoram, mace, peppermint, and, of course, anise. I saw pallets and pallets of saffron, an ingredient so key to Fernet-Branca that the company reportedly controls 75 percent of the world’s saffron market.
After a quick pass through the corporate museum, where I noted the slogan Fernet é vivere, we returned to the conference room. Branca took off his sterile gear and excused himself for a meeting, leaving me with this thought: “Fernet, it is for the person who loves the life, the person who shares it with their friends, with a beautiful woman. It’s like a concert. It’s much more than a drink.”
That evening, after a very long afternoon nap, I ate a huge meal of saffron-tinted risotto Milanese and cotoletta alla Milanese. Afterward, with a full stomach, I decided to do an impromptu tasting of amari at my table. I wanted to see if I was getting better at snap judgments and at quickly writing tasting notes—just like Paul Pacult. First up was Fernet. To be perfectly honest, beginning your relationship with amari by drinking a shot of 80-proof Fernet-Branca is like starting to learn a language by reading its physics textbooks. The taste? How about a bracing smack in the face with a eucalyptus tree? Most other amari are much lower proof than Fernet, in the 30- to 60-proof range. Ramazzotti, for instance, is perhaps the easiest drinking, with its gentle, sweet notes of orange and cola … it’s like the Coca-Cola of amari. Amaro Meletti, with its floral aroma and tastes of saffron and violet, is like … a vase full of lily-of-the-valley that still have a day or so before you have to throw them away. Amaro Montenegro, from Bologna, is an excellent starter amaro: sweeter than the others, with orange peel and cinnamon and only a touch of bitter on the finish. Amaro Montenegro was called the “liqueur of virtues” by the famed Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (though it should be noted that D’Annunzio ended up becoming a figurehead of Mussolini’s Fascists, so perhaps we should be wary of looking for virtues in a bottle of amaro). Finally, Averna, so dark and coffeelike and almost burnt tasting, with a hint of cloves and a musky scent that feels like, say, the nineteenth-century Sicilian equivalent of Starbucks with, say, a real-life castrato singing rather than Norah Jones or Neko Case. Or something like that.
The waiter was pretty amused by the fact that I’d ordered five amari. He kept checking on me to see if I’d really drink all five, then he finally