Amaro Santoni champions aperitivo in London
Luca Missaglia, managing partner of Amaro Santoni, gives us the lowdown on the Tuscan brand’s inaugural London Aperitivo Week.
The first London Aperitivo Week is currently underway in the English capital, running until Sunday 6 July.
Across the city, 15 bars and restaurants have been tasked with creating special aperitivo-style drinks using Amaro Santoni – an aromatic, floral amaro from Italy – in a bid to recreate the same family feeling that Italian drinking custom has back in its homeland.
The week started on Monday (30 June) with an event at Oblix at the Shard, led by co-founder Simone Caporale, who is also behind Barcelona bar Sips – one of the world’s most highly-regarded bars. Caporale linked up with his old partner at Artesian in The Langham hotel, Eva Kovacikova, for the evening
Other London venues taking part throughout the week to offer aperitivo-style drinks include Aqua Kyoto, Lave, Manteca, and Tayēr + Elementary.
Originally the brand only had 10 venues in mind for the activation, but with aperitivo culture growing in prominence in the UK, more chose to participate than the event’s organisers first anticipated.
“We got 15 because when we started, word spread and many bartenders and bars wanted to be a part of it,” says Luca Missaglia, managing partner of Amaro Santoni, adding that they wanted to keep the week on a “manageable level number for year one, for the simple reason that the structure we currently have is myself and two others – so not really a real structure.”
Each of the participating venues has created up to three aperitivo cocktails with the main ingredient being Amaro Santoni, an amaro crafted from an original recipe of Gabriello Santoni using 34 natural herbs and botanicals, including rhubarb.
“They can use whatever they want otherwise, but I think the key here is to create an experience and to play with a grey area between low-ABV and a Negroni,” says Missaglia.
“This is what we actually proposed to them,” he adds, as cocktails with heavy ingredients like egg don’t stimulate the appetite and ‘mesh’ with how Italian’s typically engage with aperitivo.
“Aperitivo is a specific moment in time, and that time comes just before your dinner, so it has to be something that gets that experience to go to a different level.”
Family feeling
In Italy, aperitivo isn’t about the drink, it’s about the moment – a realisation Missaglia hopes people can take away with experience in London’s week celebrating the custom.
“Italians like to gather together, you share an aperitivo with the people you love around you, with an Italian spirit, and working alongside Amaro Santoni, we had the idea to recreate this same feeling by creating a format that will be understandable, especially in the UK.
“These days I see a lot of professionals in the bars who know how to do things – like apéritif cocktails – but maybe they’ve just needed a brand to help them to connect the dots, and I hope what can happen with London Aperitivo Week.”
Expanding on this and how it can help Amaro Santoni, he explains: “For us in Italy, and people from the drinks industry, aperitivo might be normal, it’s an all-day thing, you know – distinguishing between an aperitivo and a drink – but for the general public, the aperitivo, may be just Aperol or a Spritz. We want to give them a hint that maybe with a premium product with a valuable taste of Italy – in this case of Amaro Santoni and rhubarb – maybe you can fall in love with the category and discover how much more to it there is.”
Missaglia adds that culture of aperitivo has “grown massively” in London in the past five years, but the message of London Aperitivo Week is that “it’s a week of celebration – where it doesn’t matter if it’s with a bitter drink or fizzy drink, or whatever the aperitivo cocktail – from our point of view, its to make sure that our accounts are creating experiences with a family feeling and making something unique with our brand.”
The week-long activation has fallen in one of the biggest of the year for the city’s drinks industry, with BCB London making its debut on 30 June and 1 July. This, and it being the height of summer, were big factors in the choice of dates.
Of the strategy, Missaglia says: “You know, Simone and I work a lot, not just in the UK, but globally, everywhere – from China to the States to Europe – and we have a clear understanding of the calendar and opportunity.
“We know there are many international guests in London this week, and many of them will come to the launch at Oblix. What we’re trying to do is to make a difference. We would like to have it as a platform that you can grow, not just for Santoni, but for the community.
“For example, London Cocktail Week has been a great benchmark over those years. The format might have changed, but they celebrate cocktails with their own week, so we thought, why not have one for aperitivo too?
“Lucky enough, we had a trademark on it, so it’s something that we kind of own. It adds an extra opportunity for people to really educate themselves about drinks.”
For the venues, the week can also offer insight into how to ‘fill a gap’ during a period which isn’t typically a big seller – the evening slot before dinner. In London, the busiest time is typically after the dinner period.
“Usually, when you go to a cocktail bar here, you go later at night. We’re looking at that gap between 6pm and 9pm where customers are warming up,” Missaglia notes. “So in this ‘warm up period’, they can try an apéritif with an easier drink that is lower in alcohol content, and that’s maybe even innovative, with Amaro Santoni as the base.”
He says that a few places have already mentioned that when the week comes to a close, the Santoni drinks will stay on the menu until the end of summer.
“They like the idea and it’s been positive for us to incentivise the culture of it.
“There is so much going on in London right now, so it’s a chance to evaluate our value and hopefully create something that can grow year by year.”
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