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

Bebe con responsabilidad. Para saber más sobre el consumo responsable, visita www.disfrutadeunconsumoresponsable.com You add some caramel which gives the color and the sweetness. We use a white wine, not red wine. We have 500-liter barrels at the winery with all vermouth. We use the Solera system. We refresh old vermouth with new vermouth and it has a lot of density. This vermouth, we call it the Elixir of Bandarra. We add some Elixir to each bottle of Bandarra. What it gives is a touch of the old vermouth. That’s how we make it.

It was very successful. In our opinion, the wine world needs to be fun. I mean, let’s have fun. It should be easy and fun. We already did some crazy stuff before Bandarra in the wine category. So, with Bandarra, we started in the Aperitif category, so it was pretty easy, because before El Bandarra, we did some successful launches, and that’s why they said, okay. I mean, after a wine with 67 insults in the bottle, they said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s make El Bandarra.” Pour around a third of El Bandarra Al Fresco into your glass. Add the cava and a dash of soda water. 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.For a properly English Spritz, snag a bottle of Sipello and get mixing. This brand, based in the Surrey Hills, makes its liquid with rhubarb sourced from UK farms, gooseberry, cinchona, elderflower and more, in a process inspired by the art of perfume making. SPRITZ IT The vermouths are made with grapes from the Virgili Bros vineyard at Casa Berger, near Barcelona in the Alt Penedès, which has been in continuous operation since 1878 and was bought by the Virgili family in 1962. They made vermouths for decades by the barrel for small local wine shops but launched their own brand with El Bandarra in 2014. Wanna get really wild? Spike your Spritz with a fun, flavoured liqueur or cordial. The team at British aperitivo brand Sipello like to use an elderflower liqueur in their Spritz (see their recipe below), but you can add anything with complementary flavours: coffee, fruit-based and floral liqueurs are all fair game. GO FOR THE GARNISH

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? Alex: El Bandarra is that kind of friend, she or he, who when you go out, he’s the one who remains in the club until the end of the night. He or she is that this kind of person that is a good person, but he’s a troublemaker. So that is El Bandarra, what El Bandarra means? So, we hope that it brings takes out the Bandarra that you have inside of you.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. 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. The bitter flavours of orange, rhubarb or [herbs] like rosemary are really good to open up your palate, and they really stimulate your appetite,” Luca says. With this in mind, you can swap the orange stuff for a bitter with botanicals that sound awesome to you. Keep reading for four of our fave bottles. CONSIDER THE WINE

Susan: Oh, that sounds divine. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being on the show and, hopefully, I’ll see you in Formentera.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.