Negroni

The equal-parts Italian masterpiece: gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth stirred to bitter perfection. It's an acquired taste that, once acquired, becomes a lifelong obsession.

The Negroni's most widely documented origin places it at Caffè Casoni on Via de' Tornabuoni in Florence in 1919, where bartender Fosco Scarselli served Count Camillo Negroni a strengthened Americano at the Count's request. Scarselli replaced the Americano's usual splash of soda water with gin and switched the garnish from lemon to orange to distinguish the new drink from its parent. Camillo Negroni was a colorful figure — a well-traveled Italian adventurer with documented time in America, including a period working as a fencing instructor and allegedly as a rodeo performer — and cocktail historian David Wondrich notes that while his personal claim to a formal title is uncertain, his grandfather Luigi Negroni was recorded as a count. The Negroni family itself moved quickly to capitalize on the drink's success, founding a distillery in Treviso in 1919 to produce a pre-made version called Antico Negroni. The equal-parts formula of gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari that defines the drink was first codified in French cocktail books of the late 1920s. Orson Welles, working in Rome in 1947, offered what became its most quoted endorsement in the Coshocton Tribune: the bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you, they balance each other. The International Bartenders Association officially recognized the Negroni in 1961 and it remains one of the world's most consistently ordered cocktails.