It's been said wine can be a vicarious form of travel, beaming the imbiber to distant lands by virtue of its site-specific flavour.
When I get the yearning to jet off to Italy in the Airbus of my mind, I reach not for Chianti or Barolo. I reach for Campari.
Electric red and full of Santa Claus promise, Campari belongs to a class of European liqueurs known as bitters. It's a love-it-or-leave-it proposition. Most of us choose to leave it. Chances are, if you were born in sugar-saturated North America, you will recoil at bitters.
Not me. One sip of Campari and I'm kickin' it Old World, lounging beneath a café umbrella on the Amalfi coast. Yes, that's me, wearing the white linen suit and loafers over bare feet.
Few things epitomize Euro chic better than Campari. I was reminded of this a week ago while perusing a profile in The New York Times Style Magazine about design-world's new It girl, Ambra Medda. More cosmo than the entire cast of Sex and the City, including their pink drinks, the twentysomething Ms. Medda was born in Greece and raised in Milan and London. She studied in Beijing and worked in New York and Miami, most currently as co-founder and director of the chi-chi annual Design Miami fair. Her drink of choice: Campari.
All bitters are an acquired taste, actually. Typically syrupy in texture and flavoured with herbs and plants, bitters are fortified to an alcoholic strength that falls between wine and hard spirits. Besides Campari, which is 25-per-cent alcohol, my two other favourite brands are Cynar (chee-NAR), flavoured with artichokes (cynara scolymus) and weighing in at 16.5-per-cent alcohol, and Averna. The latter hails from Sicily and is more powerful, at 32 per cent alcohol. It doesn't so much taste of bitter herbs as give you the impression of being roughed up by them in an alleyway. Like I said, acquired taste.
Other examples include Fernet-Branca and, though completely discredited in recent years by shooter-gulping American spring-breakers, Jägermeister.
But Campari, both for its colour and Milanese style, remains iconic - the Mother of all Bitters, in a yummy mummy, Prada-wearin' sort of way.
Developed by a Milano caffe owner named Gaspare Campari in the 1860s, it boasts an ingredients list more closely guarded than the formula for getting caramel into Caramilk. All that's listed on the label, in addition to sugar, alcohol and colouring, is "aromatic herbs." There is much speculation it includes rhubarb, ginseng, tree bark, ginger and orange peel among others. The colouring? Traditionally, it's been carmine, a dye derived from a beetle called dactylopius coccus, though it appears the company has been or is moving away from it in favour of an artificial dye.
Signore Campari initially touted his concoction as a medicinal potion, and it was believed to aid digestion. One disorder I have seen it cure is homesickness, specifically as manifested by Italian relatives looking for a drink to exorcise the gastrointestinal ghosts of Timbits and other North American delicacies.
I make no claims about its other possible medical indications, but I do know that Campari and its bitter kin, with the possible exception of Jägermeister, are a great way to imbue cocktails with European flair. The bitter note also helps quench summer thirst - like hops in beer - and stimulates the palate for food.
Most can be enjoyed straight, but always on the rocks. In summer they're better as long drinks, namely mixed with soda and served with a twist of orange or lemon. I'm told that in France people spike beer with Cynar, which - though I've not tried it - could only improve the flavour of most French beer.
