What’s refreshing, electric orange in hue, and popping up all over Toronto’s cocktail lists? Aperol, an herb-laced Italian aperitif originated in 1919 by the Barbieri company of Padua. It’s like Campari’s sweeter, less alcoholic cousin.
Flavoured with ingredients like bitter orange, rhubarb, gentian root and cinchona, Aperol boasts a modest alcohol content of 11 per cent, making it an ideal mixing agent. Its crisp complexity is quickly earning North American notoriety. Aperol was rated in the 90-95 category by the Wine Enthusiast in 2007, and awarded a double-gold medal – top honours – last year at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Easily potable on the rocks, Aperol is featured most famously in the spritz, a bittersweet twist on the traditional Venetian white wine spritzer. The bubbly blend of Aperol, Prosecco, soda and fresh orange caused quite a stir with Italians after its post-war inception in the 1950s. Now offered on cocktail menus from St. Lawrence’s Lucien to Queen West’s ever-popular Terroni, where bottles of the enticingly labeled liqueur line the walls, the spritz is a light segue into a heavy meal, or extremely chain-drinkable on its own.
With a sexy contemporary campaign under its belt, expect to see an increase of vermillion cocktails in the city – especially when we manage to conquer Snowmageddon and break on through to sunny, patio-strewn Toronto that we all know and love.
