Negroni Sbagliato

A happy accident that became a modern classic, this lighter sibling of the Negroni swaps gin's punch for Prosecco's effervescence.

The Negroni Sbagliato — sbagliato means mistaken or wrong in Italian — was reportedly created by accident at Bar Basso in Milan in 1972 when bartender Mirko Stocchetto, reaching for a bottle of gin to make a Negroni, picked up a bottle of Prosecco instead. Bar Basso, which opened on Via Plinio in Milan in 1947 and became one of the city's defining aperitivo institutions, was the setting for a substitution that Stocchetto could have corrected but chose not to — the customer tried the Campari, sweet vermouth, and Prosecco combination and liked it, and Stocchetto kept it on the menu as the drink you get when you ask for a Negroni and the bartender makes a mistake. The drink remained a cult item within Italian bar culture and among cocktail professionals for decades before experiencing an extraordinary global moment in 2022 when actor Emma D'Arcy — best known for playing Rhaenyra Targaryen in the HBO series House of the Dragon — described the Negroni Sbagliato with Prosecco in it as their favorite cocktail in a short video interview alongside co-star Olivia Cooke. The clip spread rapidly across TikTok and Instagram, and the combination of D'Arcy's specific, deliberate delivery of the phrase and the drink's unusual name produced one of the most discussed cocktail moments of the social media era, driving a measurable worldwide increase in orders.