Negroni Week

June 24 thru 30

It is the sixth annual Negroni Week.  What started out purely as a marketing ploy has now evolved into a cultural moment celebrating the Negroni and a way to raise a lot of money for charity {over $1.5 so far!}  We will be donating $1 for every Negroni sold that week to Lambda Legal in support of the LGBTQIA* community.  With rights under attack, Lambda Legal is a front line in delivering equality to all people, regardless of who they love!  Drink up and do good!

A Bit of Negroni Lore

The Negroni is perhaps the most week known Italian cocktail.  While there are stories galore of Count Negroni and Camillo Negroni and even a General Ninventing the drink in the 1800s in Africa or the 1910s in Italy, The problem with these stories is the lack of evidence of the Negroni’s existence in any document what so ever.  In fact, the first mention of the Negroni is a description of the drink by Orson Wells:

While working in Rome in 1947, Welles sent a message to the Coshocton Tribune describing the relatively new drink:
“The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other.”
– from A History of Drinking

And amazingly enough, it is right around this time that you can see the Negroni listed on menus, in press, in letters etc.  On the other hand, the Camillo Negroni story is he added gin to an
Americano to give it a kick and the resultant drink was so popular that he, or his family, moved to Treviso and opened the Negroni distillery to produce the cocktail.  The only problems with this story are: Americano’s were not popular in the 1918 period and were actually called Milano~Torino at the time, the distillery in question does not mention inventing the Negroni in its history but they make an aperitivo called the 1918,  and the lack of documention of this supposed astonishingly popular drink.

So you can believe the stories or let the facts intrude: the Negroni was almost certainly a post-WWII invention or at the very least, whenever it was invented, it languished in obscurity until 1947.