The Cocktail Napkin – New Year Sparkle

by Jo Petteruti, Mixologist and Owner, Jo's Stillwater Tea Room  

Welcome to 2020!  Add a little sparkle to a special day this season by trying out a cocktail that you may not have tried in the past.  Step out of your beverage comfort zone, increase the variety of flavors that your taste buds have experienced, or just have fun by expanding your understanding of flavor combinations.

A new year can bring a new set of hopes, dreams and desires.  It can also just provide new opportunities to improve what we already have or do in our lives.  Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) is a practice that is used in business to improve delivery of products and services, but it's also useful in our personal lives.  It simply means that on a continual basis, you evaluate what you do and how you do it, and then implement changes to do that same thing better, faster or more efficiently.  At the Tea Room, we continually try to improve on what we do, not just because it's good business but also because it keeps things fresh and fun too.

One of the first cocktails we crafted at the Tea Room was the Amaretto Sparkle made with DiSaronno.  We chose to carry DiSaronno because of its Italian heritage and because it is the oldest and most flavorful of the amaretto brands on the market today.  And talk about CPI – this company has been engaged in that practice for over 5 centuries!  

The sophisticated taste of DiSaronno dates back to the Renaissance, one of the most romantic and creative periods in Italian history. In 1525, the artist Bernardino Luini, a brilliant pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, was commissioned to paint a fresco of the “Madonna of the Miracles” in Saronno (it is still on display there today).  To portray the Madonna, he chose a beautiful local innkeeper as his muse.   As a mark of her gratitude, the innkeeper prepared a special gift for the artist - a flask full of an amber liqueur, fragrant and delicate. That is how the legend of DiSaronno arose - from a simple gesture of kindness and the unique handmade combination of secret ingredients.  

In 1600, a man by the name of Giovanni Reina rediscovered the innkeeper’s old recipe.  The Reina family has since closely guarded the secret formula, passing it from one generation to the next.  In the first years of the 20th century, Domenico Reina decided to open a store and workshop near the steam tram line station from Milan.  It took the name of “Domenico Reina Coloniali”, situated in the heart of Saronno and it was here that the DiSaronno Originale liqueur was produced and marketed.  Since that time, DiSaronno has undergone a number of bottling and process improvements, elevating it to the international status that it enjoys today.

Today's recipe is for our Amaretto Sparkle which is a combination of almond and dark chocolate flavors enhanced by a little Sparkling Brut that adds a light and sparkling touch.

Amaretto Sparkle Ingredients:

Preparation:

Sip and enjoy responsibly... Ciao!