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. So, what we do with this wine is we make a maceration with wormwood to get the bitterness, but we also use different citrus, like grapefruit, bitter orange and different red fruits as well. So, more fruit, more than the ones that we use for El Bandarra vermouth. For Al Fresco, instead of caramel, we use nectar of must or the juice from the grapes for that touch of sweetness. We add a touch of must to give the sweetness. Now the answer to your question about how we drink it. Our grandparents used to use a siphon or soda. It was typical. Now, it’s great to drink it over ice with a slice of orange and an olive, because I have an addiction to olives! And it was a bit hard. We listed the Rojo in, I would say 40 different accounts in the UK, but the Brit consumer didn’t understand. Then we tried, as I told you, with the rosé with tonic and it didn’t work. And we said, okay, let’s launch Al Fresco. 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?

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. It’s a business that has decreased a lot. During the Seventies, Eighties, the bulk wine business was huge. It was a lot of liters and nowadays there are beers and other drinks, but not wine. That’s our origin. Lush Life Merchandise is here – we’re talking t-shirts, mugs, iphone covers, duvet covers, ipad covers and more covers for everything! and more! 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?But while the Aperol spritz is undeniably the most popular in the UK, many European countries and regions have their own versions, from the more bitter Campari, white aperitifs, vermouths and more. The common factor is the three ingredients in the unfailing ratio of 3:2:1.

If you live for Lush Life would you consider supporting us… Just go to patreon.com/lushlife and you can donate once or monthly to make sure we are still here every Tuesday. Susan: Now Aperitivo drinking, as opposed to the hour of the vermouth – the hour that is the whole day. I know a lot about the Italian Aperitivo culture. Is it the same in Spain and in Barcelona?

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We created a few, very successful white wines before Bandarra. One which was called El Xitxarel·lo, which means a young, stupid guy in Catalan. While we are Catalan, we are very proud to be Catalan, our idiom is full of insults and swear words. It’s a very rich language in terms of insults. At the point when we launched, two years before launching El Bandarra, we launched this white wine, which has 67 insults on the screen-printed label. Suddenly a group of wild hipsters, they started drinking vermouth in some bars in Barcelona. And this is when we said, “Well, this is great.” We asked our father, “Dad, do we make vermouth at the winery?” We didn’t even know. He said, “Are you an idiot? Of course, we’ve been doing vermouth for several years?” A new vermouth created by two brothers in Barcelona to challenge “the uptight nature of the drinks business” is being launched in the UK. Founded by twins Alex and Albert Virgili, the duo merge their experience with the wine industry to create a lineage of innovative wine-based aperitivo that speak to the free-flowing culture of Barcelona. Balancing the bittersweet with Mediterranean botanicals, El Bandarra ensure there is a drink to suit every tastebud — all whilst keeping the energy high and the good times great.

Alex: Right. Well, let me tell you that in Spain, our concept of Al Fresco is our grannies. So, if you come during summer in many little towns and villages, the grannies take their chairs, and they go outside in the street and they meet with their friends. They share information. They are like the FBI of each little town and that for us is Al Fresco. It follows the success of their first three vermouths under the name of El Bandarra – Spanish for “the rogue”: Vermut Red, Vermut White and Vermut Rosé. Alex: For the first three years was Rojo. We launched the brand in 2014, then after two years of seeding the brand, we drove the brand from regional to national in Spain. That was when we started having more distribution and more clients. Some clients asked us why didn’t make a white. So, we thought, “Okay, let’s make a white.” When we bottled the Blanco, at some point, we thought that maybe we put in too much vanilla. We thought it smelled too much of vanilla or we tired different botanicals.El Bandarra Vermut Red is made with Macabeo and Xarel·lo grapes plus more than 50 extracts of herbs, flowers and spices such as cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, liquorice, aniseed, camomile, rosemary, bay leaf, hops and bitter orange – rested in oak barrels before bottling at 15% ABV.

Bartending boss Giuseppe Gallo created Savoia to sit in the sweet spot between red bitters and sweet vermouth - and the man hit the mark. This stuff is made from a base of Marsala and Trebbiano wines, giving it a slightly nutty and crisp character, plus botanicals including bitter orange, gentian, rhubarb and aloe. SPRITZ ITBorn into a wine-making family, he and his brother are on a mission to make wine-drinking fun by taking those traditions of the past and reinventing them to enjoy today. He is here to teach us Hot To Drink El Bandarra Vermouth!