Get the recipes: Alpine Negroni and Mezcal White Negroni
The creation of the White Negroni is one of many bar tales where substitution was the mother of invention: Visiting France for an event in 2001 and needing to make Negronis but unable to find Campari, London bartender Wayne Collins picked up Suze instead, adding it, and the French aperitif wine Lillet Blanc, to the Plymouth gin base. Collins sadly passed away in 2023, but drinks writer Robert Simonson spoke to Collins about the White Negroni for Punch, where Collins indicated he just thought the name would catch on easily with industry folks.
Simonson says he’d always assumed “white” to be a stand-in for “clear,” even though most drinks with “white” in their name actually are. “I think his marketing sense was sound. I doubt anyone would buy a Clear Negroni, or a Yellow Negroni,” Simonson said in an email. Nor, I speculate, would a “Medical Specimen Negroni” bring all the boys to the yard — except for snickering 12-year-old ones, too young to drink it but gleeful over its appearance. Look, folks, I don’t make the rules, but one of them is that a vibrant red cocktail and a vibrant yellow cocktail hit different for members of a species who are occasionally required to pee in a cup.
If you haven’t stopped reading, congratulations! Because a White Negroni by any other name would taste as bittersweet. Though clearly related, White Negronis made with classic French gentian liqueurs are notably different on the palate from their red cousins, largely because of how the botanicals in those liqueurs differ from red Italian bitters.
To be clear, Campari itself, like many other bitters, bittersweet liqueurs and aromatized wines, almost certainly contains some variety of gentian, a plant that’s a component of a huge number of cocktail ingredients. Gentian is the only specific botanical acknowledged on the label of vital cocktail bitters Angostura. It’s in digestive bitters Underberg — according to Amy Stewart’s book about boozy plants, “The Drunken Botanist,” gentian’s medical uses date back at least 3,000 years.
In many of these liquids, the gentian acts a bitter base on which other flavors are layered — think of all the baking spice notes in Angostura, the chinotto, ginseng, rhubarb, bitter orange, the whole wizard’s closet of other herbs and spices that flavor red bitters such as Campari, Aperol and their kin.
But there’s a long Alpine tradition of gentian herbal medicine evolving into this specific liqueur, often known as gentiane in France. These are more purely gentian-focused, typically made of gentian lutea, a bright yellow flowering plant that grows wild in many mountain regions; the plant has thick roots that are dried and used for the drink. “It’s a gnarly plant,” says Jake Parrott, portfolio manager for importer Haus Alpenz. “Imagine 30 horseradish roots kind of tied together growing in all different directions and buried in the ground.”
Parrott sometimes describes Haus Alpenz’s goal as trying to find “new drinkers of old things.” Along with the aperitifs Bonal and Cocchi Americano, both of which include gentian in their roster of botanicals, they import Salers, a gentiane from a producer that has operated in France’s alpine Massif Central since the late 1800s. The version of Salers they bring to the United States doesn’t sport the traffic-light yellow of Suze, Avèze or of the Salers sold in France — it’s a pale gold and has a delicate woodsy, earthy bitterness. (It’s tough to describe flavor, but one tasting note Haus Alpenz mentions is radish, and yes! Delightfully so.)
“It provides a focused backbone for a cocktail, and allows for making colorless drinks with a lot of character — part of the trompe l’oeil that’s so fun in cocktails,” Parrott says. “Red bitter liqueurs are driven by both citrus and gentian, with the citrus providing both flavor and bitterness. … Gentian liqueurs can allow flavors of the other ingredients to come through while providing an earthy backbeat.”
What got me tasting gentian drinks recently was the Alpine Negroni, a recipe that I stumbled across while in search of drinks to make use of creme de menthe. Somewhere out there are drinkers for whom the Stinger is a regular pleasure, who crave Grasshoppers after dinner, burning through creme de menthe like Hummers through gasoline. I am not one of those drinkers. My bottle was nearly full five years after I bought it.
Right away I saw the Alpine Negroni had bona fides, coming from Naren Young when he was still creative director at Dante NYC. When I read through the (somewhat daunting) list of ingredients, I could practically taste it, and the reality lived up to the imagining: Minty freshness but with more botanical complexity, with bitterness from the gentian, it’s a drink that conveys cold mountain air, laced with the scent of pine. It’s a drink that tastes wonderfully green.
I asked Young, now creative director of Sweet Liberty in Miami, about the drink’s genesis. At Dante, he said, they always had 12 permanent Negroni variations listed on the menu, but would throw in one “that was a little more left field. A bit of a head scratcher, if you will.” With the Alpine Negroni, “I wanted to create something that was more of a winter drink, hence the use of alpine ingredients, plus a little mint liqueur for brightness and the woodsy aroma of rosemary as the garnish.”
It’s one of the best Negroni riffs I’ve had, but I know that many cocktailers are unlikely to have all these ingredients at their fingertips. So I extracted myself from the depths of the botanical rabbit hole and started nibbling around at the entrance of the warren. My previous favorite White Negroni variation was one made with mezcal, the classic three equal parts formula, much easier to make.
Both the mezcal version and the original gin-based recipe are great spots to play around with different varieties of gentian liqueur. Compare how the drink works with a classic French gentian liqueur like Salers or Suze, where the grassiness of the liqueur highlights the smoke and vegetal notes in the agave spirit, and with a more Italian-style gentian/bitter orange liqueur such as Luxardo Bitter Bianco (which is nearly colorless) or Don Ciccio & Figli’s Cinque. I may not ever get comfortable with calling this Negroni variation “white,” but I’m fine with calling it “delicious.”
Get the recipes: Alpine Negroni and Mezcal White Negroni
