A Spirited Afternoon with Amaro dell'Etna
When an Iconic Sicilian Amaro Brand Visits New York
A Taste of Sicily
As many of you might already know, I’ve got a thing for amaro. I even wrote a whole book on the subject. When I first got into amaro in the early-to-mid-2000s when I was living in Seattle, the selection of brands available was pretty limited to Campari, Averna, and Fernet-Branca, but soon more Italian-born imports started to appear on the backbar like Zucca, Cynar, and Ramazzotti. By the time I moved to Brooklyn in 2010, dozens of new imports were lining bottle shop shelves, and soon dynamic expressions from American producers began to enter the conversation.
While the metro shelves taking up an entire wall of my kitchen are now weighed down with hundreds of different bottles of amaro, I can’t help but get excited when a new brand is launched or a previously unavailable Italian import makes its way stateside. That was the case in 2017, when the distributor M.S. Walker Brands brought the Sicilian-born Amaro dell’Etna to the U.S. Since 1868, Averna has been made in Caltanissetta and was known around the world, embodying what we expected a Sicilian amaro should taste like—a brightness from southern Italian lemons and oranges rounded out with warm Mediterranean herbs.
Amaro dell’Etna was first made in 1901 in Catania, but until fairly recently seemed content remaining a homegrown brand, barley known beyond Sicily, but upon its arrival stateside it quickly became a favorite among bartenders and amaro enthusiasts like myself. (While not a scientific fact, I would say that the number of times when someone drops an after-dinner amaro on the table or sends me a glass across the bar it’s Amaro dell’Etna.)
With an herbaceous backbone and rich pops of citrus and warm layers of spiciness, Amaro dell’Etna is made from a blend of 26 100% all-natural herbs, plants, and botanicals (including bitter citrus and orange peels, rhubarb, and licorice), are allowed to rest and mature for 2 months before bottling. But what truly drives the character of Amaro dell’Etna is that 15 of these ingredients are sourced directly from the mineral-rich soil from the slopes of nearby Mount Etna. A sommelier friend once described Amaro dell’Etna as “the love child of Amaro Nardini and Braulio,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Last year when M.S. Walker Brands asked If I would be interested in being part of an event with Amaro dell’Etna’s CEO and owner Fabio Parziano here in New York I didn’t hesitate to say yes. The event was supposed to occur last fall and then moved to this past spring but had to be delayed due to scheduling and travel plans. And finally, last Tuesday, we all got together at Caffe Dante with an intimate group of bartenders, servers, bar owners, and media for a late-afternoon aperitivo hour where we tasted through their portfolio while I conducted an engaging conversation with Fabio about Amaro dell’Etna, Sicily, and Italian drinking culture.
Let’s Talk About Amaro
