Fernet Branca, 70cl, ABV 39%

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According to official courses, the Fernet Branca recipe is made of a mélange of 27 herbs, roots and spices. The exact ratio of those ingredients remains a closely guarded secret but some of the most notable include rhubarb, camomile, cinnamon, peppermint oil, and saffron. It’s that combination of peppermint oil and saffron which gives Fernet its toothpaste-adjacent menthol flavour. Some sourcesclaim that the Branca family is responsible for an estimated 75% of the world’s saffron consumption, controlling the market price of it like the spice mined on Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune. After that she wouldn’t “get her nose close to a bottle of Fernet for many years,” preferring gin and tonic.

He’s still baffled by the fact that Argentinians pair the beverage with food at dinners and social events. To some palates, the incredibly bitter Italian liquor is worse than cough syrup. Bizarrely though, in Argentina it’s so popular that the country now consumes more than 75% of all Fernet produced globally. And since the drink is traditionally mixed with Coca-Cola in an ice-filled glass, it also contributes to making Argentina one of the planet’s highest Coke consumers. Typically, the initial tasting is a hostile experience, but the drink eventually wins over its audience.Although the bar displays an array of spirit and wine bottles, Chico sells on average 70 glasses of Fernet a day. He claims that the central Argentine city of Cordoba alone consumes more Fernet than all of Italy, largely because of its strong Italian heritage. Juan Chico, manager of BARTOK bar and restaurant in the upscale Palermo neighborhood in Buenos Aires, says Fernet is the most widely consumed liquor in the restaurant. Fernet owes its unconventional taste to a top secret recipe that involves about 40 different herbs including saffron, rhubarb, cardamom, myrrh, chamomile, aloe and gentian root. Trying it out was like a kiss, a bitter kiss that burns your tongue and makes your eyes close in disgust.” Digliardi, who moved to Buenos Aires in 2008, recalls his grandfather drinking Fernet as a digestif with a glass of hot water.

This cookie is set by Rubicon Project to control synchronization of user identification and exchange of user data between various ad services. After three years in Buenos Aires, I now have a very strong and passionate relationship with Fernet,” she says. It had been two years since I’d seen anyone drink Fernet in Italy,” says Italian nightclub promoter Giovanni Digliardi, who did a double take the first time he stepped into an Argentine bar and was immediately offered a “Fernecola” – Fernet mixed with Coke.We met here for the first time, the womanizer Fernet I had heard so much about,” romanticizes Yasmin Simeonova, an architect from Macedonia working in Buenos Aires.