El Bandarra Al Fresco - Barcelona Aperitivo, Drink with Tonic or as a Spritz, Bittersweet, Alternative to Pink Gin, Notes of Grapefruit and Mediterranean Botanicals - 1 Litre Bottle, 14% ABV

Product Information

El Bandarra Vermouth is made from high-quality Macabeo and Xarel·lo grapes, native to the region. Once these grapes are transformed into wine, they are aged in wooden barrels and later macerated with a careful blend of botanicals, including wormwood, orange, and elderflower, among others. This intricate process provides the drink with its distinct flavour and aromatic profile. Susan: And always trying it with tonic to make sure you get the proportions? Right? Because I assume that was the idea to always have it with tonic. Virgili Bros has a mission to “challenge the uptight nature of the drinks business by creating original and enjoyable concepts” such as its El Bandarra Vermut range. Susan: Okay. Yes, we like our crazy ideas they’re going to work. Right. Where did you start? What was your thinking and how long did it take to get the first thing in the bottle that you liked? Adding an olive – with the saltiness of the olive, amazing how it tastes and when you eat the olive with this vermouth taste, it’s like making love. It’s good. It’s great.

Fill a wine glass with ice and add the El Bandarra Al Fresco and Cava. Top up with soda, lightly stir and garnish with a slice of grapefruit. Sipello 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.” 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.

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? 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. 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?

The drink typically has three ingredients - a bitter, a sparkling wine and soda water - but with a little imagination, you can make the Spritz all your own. To help you tap into your Spritz intuition, here are our pro tips - featuring expert input from Luca, of course.

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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.