The setting was wrong. All wrong.
For starters, it was nighttime in Washington, D.C. It was indoors — which, wrong as it was, was just as well, given what a damp, drizzly winter’s night it was. It was a good night for some warming whiskey — a smoky Islay single malt, perhaps, maybe even an Irish coffee. But the bistro chalkboard was advertising something entirely different, something suited to an Italian sidewalk café on a blazing summer afternoon: Aperol Spritzes.
It is a measure of a drink becoming a standard when it starts being offered and ordered in times and places far removed from its origin. The Aperol Spritz evolved from a Venetian specialty of wine and fizzy water garnished with an olive. By the ‘50s, it had established itself as a drink of champagne and Aperol (and no olive, thank you very much). In this interim iteration, the cocktail was marketed in Italy as a low-alcohol choice for the young woman who wanted to keep her wits about her.
There was a problem with the drink. Though the champagne made for a delicious and sophisticated spritz, it also made for the sort of expensive quaff that could break a date’s budget. (Remember when broke journalist Gregory Peck takes incognito princess Audrey Hepburn to a café in Roman Holiday: Hepburn orders champagne, and Peck has to scrounge liras from a pal.)
The price-point problem was solved by switching out the champagne for the sweet local alternative, prosecco, and tempering the whole thing with some fizzy water. A ubiquitous café drink in Italy, it spread through Europe but remained all but unknown in the United States. (My standard for whether a drink is known is not whether you can find a bartender who knows how to make it in New York or San Francisco, but whether you can step up to a decent bar in Des Moines, Iowa, and order it with confidence. Five years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to do that with an Aperol Spritz. You would have been lucky if the bar even had a bottle of Aperol.)
And that’s how it was until about five years ago, when the Aperol Spritz enjoyed a savvy and subtle promotional campaign. The Campari people (who own the Aperol liqueur brand) set about getting spritzes served at parties in the Hamptons. But not just any parties. The beachfront bacchanals had to be happening during the day, and they had to be outside. That way, the spritzes would pop in all their orangey glory when captured in photos taken on one’s cellphone and shared.
There’s no overestimating how important it is these days that a drink photograph well. Millennials have a motto: “The phone eats first.” Before tucking into one’s pop-up restaurant dinner or one’s speakeasy cocktail, one has to take a picture first and share the wonder of one’s life via Instagram. And on Instagram feeds, orange works a curious magic.
If you saw one of the documentaries on the disastrous Fyre Festival, you’ll remember that the promoters stumbled on a strange marketing phenomenon: The color orange is particularly attention-grabbing on Instagram. And so, the influencers who helped advertise the festival did so in part by posting solid orange “tiles.” The same principle was key to making the Aperol Spritz into what may be the first social media cocktail.
Adding to the visual appeal, the marketers chose to change the standard glass from a stubby highball glass to a balloon goblet, adding to the visual appeal for women, who make up both the majority of Aperol Spritz drinkers and the majority of people on Instagram.
Not that the drink needs all that Instagram help anymore. I would expect the Aperol Spritz to pass the Des Moines test. Please just wait for a nice, sunny spring weekend day.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
