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For the past several years, I’ve been waking up early to train for various marathons (I know, I need a new hobby). The more often I drink, the more likely I am to hit snooze the next day, which means that glasses of wine and inventive co*cktails have been about as rare as actually funny dad jokes. But just because I avoid alcohol doesn’t mean I don’t desire real Adult drinks. When my friends are sipping Greek wine, I need an alternate that’s not always soda and bitters or Diet co*ke.
29 Mocktails Worthy of a Second Round
Call them zero-proof, nonalcoholic, or whatever you please—one thing’s for sure: these spirit-free co*cktails are no joke.
And that’s where Lurisia Chinotto comes in. When I first tasted this caramel-colored bitter Italian soda, I thought I was sipping an amaro-forward co*cktail. That’s because the source of its flavor—a fruit by the same name—is also a key ingredient in many amari. A member of the citrus family, chinotto (also called myrtle-leaf oranges) are typically orange in color and ping-pong-ball-y in size, with an acidic sharpness that makes them good candidates for preserving and candying (and bad candidates for snacking on raw). Chinotto is grown for commercial purposes (rather than for ornamentation) primarily in Liguria, but they arrived by way of China, as the name implies, back in the 15th century. The drink itself wasn’t invented until the 1950s, some 500 years later.
Chinotto the beverage is refreshingly bitter—but not so much so that you can’t drink it like a soda. It has an intense, warm fragrance of cinnamon and clove and the sourness of rhubarb, quince, and grapefruit (that is, all of my favorite fruits). It tastes sort of like a cream soda that’s been stripped of all of its unnecessary sweetness and bolstered with a hit of citrus and spice.
You could mix chinotto with spirits for a co*cktail, but I just store it in the fridge and pull it out when friends are pouring something with an ABV. I get to pretend I’m Italian and satisfy my craving for a sophisticated drink. And I know I’ll be ready (“ready”) to hop (“hop”) out of bed when the alarm goes off at 6 a.m.
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