Enzoni

A gin and Campari sour with fresh muddled grapes, blending Italian bitterness with vineyard freshness.

The Enzoni was created by Vincenzo Errico in 2001 while working at the Match Bar on Great Portland Street in London — one of the bars at the center of the London cocktail renaissance of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Errico, who grew up in Italy and brought both an Italian sensibility and an Italian affection for the Negroni to his bartending, developed the drink by hybridizing the Negroni's bitter-sweet stirred structure with the fresh-fruit and lemon-juice elements of a gin sour. His formula — gin, Campari, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, and muddled fresh grapes — produces a cocktail that occupies the space between the two categories, the grapes' juice and aromatic skin compounds adding a fresh fruitiness that neither the Negroni nor the standard gin sour alone provides. The name is a portmanteau of Errico's nickname Enzo and the Negroni, acknowledging the drink's Italian heritage explicitly. Errico subsequently worked at Milk & Honey in New York City, the celebrated speakeasy bar opened by Sasha Petraske on Eldridge Street on New Year's Eve 1999 that was arguably the most influential craft cocktail bar in American history, where the Enzoni gained the international audience that established it as a modern classic.