Quick Sip - Luxardo
Wait, they don't just make cherries?
If you pay attention to your garnishes, or if you’ve read this newsletter for quite a while, you may have been surprised by last week’s recipe when Luxardo was an ingredient but wasn’t attached to cherries at all. The brand is effectively synonymous with good cocktail cherries, and if you know anything else they make it’s probably their straw-wrapped bottles of Maraschino liqueur. You likely don’t think of them as an amaro producer at all. The dichotomy here is interesting and very regional-drinks-history, so I want to dive into it quickly.
One Part Croat, One Part Italian
Luxardo started in Croatia, which is why they specialize in Marasca cherries. They produced Maraschino there for well over 100 years. There’s even still a factory bearing the name in Zadar! Luxardo, you might notice, is not a traditionally-Croatian name; it’s very much more Italian. The founder, Girolamo, was actually an emissary to the Austrian Empire from the Kingdom of Sardinia, a present-day Italian in present-day Croatia. The company always had roots in both cultures.
The family continued to operate the distillery, and it grew in prominence in the Empire. However, post-WWI treaties moved Zadar from the Austrian Empire to the Kingdom of Italy, so technically the company itself also became Italian at that point. But it wasn’t until the aftermath of WWII, during which the distillery was nearly completely destroyed, that the family moved operations to the Italian peninsula.
That makes it sound like they had a choice, which they didn’t. Italians were no longer welcome in (then) Yugoslavia following the war and subsequent nationalist uprising. Some of the family members that didn’t make it out in time were executed.
This is probably apocryphal, but the legend has it that third-generation Giorgio Luxardo absconded with some cherries and a tree which he planted in Venice before establishing a new factory near Padua (where it remains today). The sixth generation of the family is still involved in the business today - they claim to retain “entire control.”
Amakin Amaro
I can’t figure out when the company truly diversified away from cherry-only products and into a more traditional line of Italian liqueurs. It seems fair to say that none of them are original ideas - Bitter is designed explicitly as a Campari clone, and most of the catalog are Italian mainstays like Sambuca, Limoncello, and Amaretto.
It seems safe to say that all of this expansion was done on the peninsula, and it while I expect cherry products are still the company’s cash cow, it does seem that most of their marketing dollars these days go towards expanding their selection and trying to go to-to-toe with Italian juggernaut Gruppo Campari.
These kinds of vignettes are one of my favorite things about learning more about spirits; so many of these concerns have been going for so long that there’s inevitably interesting history to find once you start digging a bit.