Summer drinks

There are some cramped, unimaginative people who — I have been told — maintain that writing about wine is a bootless enterprise. Even more extraordinary, I have heard it rumored that there exist unfortunate sods who believe that it is a waste of time to gather with friends over food and wine while discussing the events of the day, the state of the republic, the repair of one’s soul. Fortunately, neither you nor I are acquainted with any such freaks, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this column and I would not be sitting down to write it. At the end of his brief, tantalizing book The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary critic (do you sense a passing adumbration of contradiction there?

Some undetermined time in the long past, possibly in 1890s Montana, a miner had finished a long and tiring day and needed a refreshing beer. But after aparticularly taxing shift, a beer wasn’t going to cut it alone. He asked the barman for a shot of whisky as well — and washed it down with his pint. It’s hard to call the boilermaker a cocktail, and inventing one certainly wasn’t on the mind of our tired protagonist. To this day, mixing beer and spirits is not generally the province of mixologists; it’s a combination more often favored by partygoers looking to get slammed as entertainingly and quickly as possible.

Cocktails, for all their pleasures, rarely become memes. And yet, a variant of the Negroni did that last year, during the press tour for the Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon. When Olivia Cooke asked her co-star, Emma D’Arcy, what their favorite summer drink is, they replied: “Negroni sbagliato,” before flirtatiously adding, “with Prosecco in it.” Cooke’s response — “Ooh, stunning!” — turned the charming interaction into a viral moment. Bars were subsequently inundated with orders for them. For those unfamiliar, the Negroni is a classic Italian summer cocktail consisting of equal parts of gin (I recommend Bombay Sapphire), Campari and sweet vermouth (preferably Martini & Rossi). A dash of orange aromatic bitters is also a nice touch.