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You could say that there’s a Negroni (or a relative of the classic drink) for every season. The gin-based standard (equal parts gin, bitter red Campari, and sweet vermouth, though I like to pour a little extra gin in there to cut the sweetness) could go all year, but it’s perfect for sipping on a long summer evening while you snack on olives and prosciutto. And the Boulevardier (rye… or bourbon, but please, rye, Campari, and sweet vermouth again) is a delicious cold-weather combination if there ever was one.
And in between—for fall—there’s a drink called Remember the Alimony.
I’d forgotten about this drink until I started browsing the pages of Spirited: Cocktails from Around the World, a new, nearly-encylopaedic cocktail book by Adrienne Stillman.
Many cocktail books rehash the classics—concoctions that will likely be familiar to anyone who’s been sipping their way through the last few months (or years). Or they focus on a single famous bar or a single style of drink. This book, though, might suffice as the only cocktail book a drinker needs. It contains about 610 answers to the question of “What do you want to drink tonight?”, spanning a broad swath of time and tradition.
It’s organized by general style (refreshing, sour, spirit-forward, etc.), with similar cocktails from different eras presented together, three or four to a page. A pre-Prohibition sherry flip appears above a recent variation made with PX sherry and reposado tequila; a 1930s-era Champagne julep shares the page with a gin and genever version that’s much older, and a modern amaro-based variation that’s popular in Argentina. This book will help beginners start to detect patterns—the ways that recent generations of drinks have emerged from classic roots.
I was knee-deep in the section of Negroni variations when I came across Remember the Alimony: a three-ingredient cocktail from Dan Greenbaum, now of Brooklyn’s Diamond Reef. Greenbaum created it for The Beagle—a bar that opened in 2011 around the corner from my old apartment, which sadly closed in 2013, many, many sherry drinks later.
“I like sherry a lot and it featured heavily in what we were doing at that bar,” Greenbaum told me recently by email. He’d been working on a Negroni riff and grabbed Cynar, a bittersweet amaro that’s a bit more vegetal, dark, and deep in tone than Campari. Since he already had all the richness he needed, he reached for crisp, dry fino sherry instead of luscious sweet vermouth. The combination needed less gin in the mix, so the result is a little less alcoholic than your standard Negroni. It’s silky and soft, and quite a bit more savory than the original, with a gentle citrus aroma thanks to its orange twist. It’s the kind of cocktail you want to sip slowly as you settle into a comfortable chair, hiding your phone from yourself and curling up with a good book. Maybe you have a wedge of cheese to make your way through, or a little bowl of salty roasted walnuts—something, anything, to make the moment last a little longer. Fall is fleeting. But an autumnal cocktail can help you catch it.
