In the case of the Negroni Sbagliato, sometimes being ‘wrong’ can be oh so right

“Darling, you simply must have a ,” someone is sure to say to you sometime soon, if they haven’t already. Italian cocktails are all the rage. The Aperol Spritz, Campari Spritz and Negroni are everywhere, much to the delight of the Campari Group, the liquor giant that owns both Aperol and Campari. And now you can add one drink more to that expanding list, the Negroni Sbagliato.

The story goes that in 1972, bartender Mirko Stocchetto mistakenly mixed up a bottle of gin with a bottle of prosecco while making a Negroni at the historic Bar Basso in Milan. The resulting “mistake,” or “sbagliato” in Italian, became that bar’s signature drink.

What a great story — except for a few things. Sbagliato doesn’t mean mistake, it simply means “wrong,” which has a different connotation. And it is nearly impossible to mix up a bottle of gin with a bottle of prosecco. There is no gin bottle anywhere that looks anything like the classic thickened wine bottle used for sparkling prosecco (it is under pressure after all). Furthermore, you hold the bottles differently — wine bottles by the body, liquor bottles by the neck — so no professional bartender could, or would, ever make that mistake. Finally, a Negroni without gin but made with sparkling wine is actually a version of the classic Americano cocktail, which begat the Negroni itself, not the other way around.

A little history. The Americano was a cocktail designed by Gaspare Campari, the creator of Campari itself. Essentially it was a mix of Italian sweet vermouth, Campari and soda water. Invented in the 1860s atcock Campari’s bar in Milan, the Americano is credited with Campari’s early success. But the Americano was just another version of the earlier Milano-Torino cocktail, which featured soda water, Campari and Punt e Mes. A Turin aperitif, Punt e Mes is made by combining Italian sweet vermouth and bitters, and was created by the progenitor of sweet vermouth itself, Antonio Carpano. Carpano is perhaps best known these days as the company that also produces Carpano Antica, the vanguard of modern premium vermouth.

In 1919, a bartender in Florence was instructed to substitute gin for the soda water in a customer’s Americano cocktail and the result was named after that customer, the Negroni (some say he was a count). Ironically, 1919 was also about the same time another drink rose to prominence in the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This drink took to combining soda water and sometimes sparkling wine to Italian aperitifs and calling them by the German name for sparkling — spritzen.

The spritz was born. A hundred years later, it is all the rage.