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Alex: So, imagine when my grandparents started in 1962, basically they bought a winery and they started selling bulk wine. At that point, the wine consumption in Spain was so high. It was around 70 liters per person per year of consumption, which now is less than 20. That’s the reality. Perennially popular across Europe for centuries, many household names – including Campari and Aperol – continue to use the same sacred recipes, but there’s also a new wave of producers who have set out to shake up the status quo. How to drink apéritifs Susan: My grandmother was the one to teach me to drink one spirit only because then I wouldn’t get a hangover. She also was the first person to introduce me to the caipirinha. So, I had a grandmother who liked her drink and yes, and she saw, I liked my drink. And so, she would teach me these things. Susan: What was the flavor profile? Did you have an idea, or did you want to make it taste like something specific that you had before? According to Luca, soda isn’t 100% necessary to making an epic Spritz - he says it can make the drink too watered down.
Alex: We launch Al Fresco in July 2020. So, we were in the middle of a pandemic. We thought, okay. But I have to say that even from all from our learnings, mainly in the UK market, we tried to push the serve as how we drink it in Barcelona or in Madrid or all over Spain. The whole point of the aperitivo is to work up an appetite for a bangin’ meal with a drink that’s big on bitter notes - and the Spritz is ALL about bitterness, since it’s typically made with liqueurs or vermouths that get their bitter complexity from botanicals. Alex: Hipsters are doing the same. How it’s made is with white wine and it’s a fortified wine with a different number of botanicals. Wormwood gives it bitterness. It’s one of the key ingredients. We also use cinnamon, clove, bitter orange, and over 50 botanicals. It’s 45% ABV. With a modern, vibrant bottle design, the new El Bandarra Al Fresco is recommended for a simple serve of one part Al Fresco and two parts tonic water over ice, garnished with an orange slice. Alex: We have an obsession for this. Now we are working on a campaign for Al Fresco, our new aperitive. In our new campaign, we will talk about our grannies, our abuela’s.The taste of Barcelona in a bottle. Al Fresco is El Bandarra’s long drink, perfect to extend the good times with friends. The bitter flavours of orange, rhubarb or [herbs] like rosemary are really good to open up your palate, and they really stimulate your appetite,” Luca says. With this in mind, you can swap the orange stuff for a bitter with botanicals that sound awesome to you. Keep reading for four of our fave bottles. CONSIDER THE WINE Bebe con responsabilidad. Para saber más sobre el consumo responsable, visita www.disfrutadeunconsumoresponsable.com
Fill a wine glass with ice and add the Amaro Santoni and Prosecco. Lightly stir, then garnish with two green olives. Savoia Alex: I’m El Bandarra, but it was my brother’s idea. We are a great team, Albert and I spent most, all, of our whole life together. We are twins and he’s a genius, he’s a super creative person. He came up with this idea, so I always say that he’s the software and I’m the hardware. Much like finally finding the right sunglasses for your face shape, nailing the art of aperitivo hour is crucial to enjoying a successful summer. Susan: Fab. Now I always end by asking my guests the same question: If you could have any drink anywhere right now, where would that be? Alex: We started with, Rojo. In Spain, out of every 10 bottles of vermouth, nine are Rojo. It was the main vermouth that we had at the winery. We started with this one for the first three years, we were only focused on Bandarra Rojo.An aperitivo cannot be without anything to eat,” he says. “At the same time as you're drinking, you eat the olives. I think that really completes the whole experience.”
Alex: First, we tasted it and we loved it and thought that this vermouth was a great product. Then we thought, because it’s wine-based, we are in the middle between wine, beer, and spirits. Vermouth is in the middle. It’s an easy serve. We thought we need to put this drink in a food market or in a festival in Spain, and I’m talking about the first two years when we were seeding the brand in Barcelona mainly and Catalonia region. What we did was, we took this recipe and we bottled it and we created El Bandarra. And that’s how it was born in September 2014. Alex: No, the Rojo, the one that you have there, it’s in Catalan. As I told you, if we’re Catalonia, we sell the screen-printed bottles in Catalan and for the rest of Spain, we sell it in Spanish. If you want to preserve your language, you need to speak it, use insults also and the tapas and everything. That’s why we have the Spanish bottle and the Catalan bottle.Alex: Yeah, at some point, we thought maybe we should add some more sweetness, but it has a good, really perfect balance between bitterness and sweetness. Maybe it’s a touch dry, but it’s not as dry as or more bitter as others, it’s a soft vermouth. It’s very soft. That’s what we did. We maintained the recipe. At that point, there was no branding. It was only in barrels. No branding. A Spritz is simply made,” says Luca Missaglia, Italian bartending legend and the managing partner of aperitivo brand Amaro Santoni. “You make a Spritz with the heart. You make it how you feel, you know?” Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. Fill a wine glass with ice and add the Savoia Americano and Prosecco. Lightly stir, then garnish with three green grapes. El Bandarra Al Fresco It was very successful. In our opinion, the wine world needs to be fun. I mean, let’s have fun. It should be easy and fun. We already did some crazy stuff before Bandarra in the wine category. So, with Bandarra, we started in the Aperitif category, so it was pretty easy, because before El Bandarra, we did some successful launches, and that’s why they said, okay. I mean, after a wine with 67 insults in the bottle, they said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s make El Bandarra.”
Alex: There were a lot of soda brands. So, during the early Eighties, Seventies, all over Spain, in every little town, there was a carbonicus. A carbonicus was where distributors used to refill bottles of soda. They were everywhere. There were hundreds of different brands that used to use this kind of bottle that we have. It has this tap mechanical tap. Suddenly, the system was not, in terms of sanitization, it was not the proper. Alex: El Bandarra is that kind of friend, she or he, who when you go out, he’s the one who remains in the club until the end of the night. He or she is that this kind of person that is a good person, but he’s a troublemaker. So that is El Bandarra, what El Bandarra means? So, we hope that it brings takes out the Bandarra that you have inside of you.
El Bandarra Al Fresco Details
Normally for that red sangria, many restaurants use that and there’s also the very amous, sangria of Cava. With a white sangria with Cava, they can use a touch of Bandarra Blanco to give a point of sweetness. I’m not a sangria drinker. I’m more of a vermouth drinker, but, yeah, a touch of Bandarra, is always great for enjoying sangria also. The vermouths are made with grapes from the Virgili Bros vineyard at Casa Berger, near Barcelona in the Alt Penedès, which has been in continuous operation since 1878 and was bought by the Virgili family in 1962. They made vermouths for decades by the barrel for small local wine shops but launched their own brand with El Bandarra in 2014. Susan: I love that it’s called the “Hour of Vermouth. It seems to last all afternoon, even though it’s technically one hour. So, when you went to your family, your dad and mom and said, “Do we make vermouth?” What was in your head? What did you want to create and how did you go about creating it? Amongst the range, there is also the Bandarra Spritz — a refreshing long drink that offers guests that Barcelona-by-the-beach feeling. Prepping a tumbler glass with ice, simply pour 1/3 El Bandarra Al Fresco into your glass. Adding cava, a dash of soda water and a garnish of grapefruit, ice and an olive, it will become near impossible to get rid of your party guests. Where in the world does an hour turn into the whole day. Every Saturday and Sunday from 12 – 3, El Barcelonís, surrounded by their friends and family, spend the entire afternoon sipping vermouth before lunch even begins. Today’s guest is gunning for the whole world to embrace La Hora del Vermut!
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