Typically, the initial tasting is a hostile experience, but the drink eventually wins over its audience. She started swallowing the liquor toward the end of nights with friends because she liked “the refreshing and sweet taste of Coke.” Fernet owes its unconventional taste to a top secret recipe that involves about 40 different herbs including saffron, rhubarb, cardamom, myrrh, chamomile, aloe and gentian root.

I’m a product of the U.S. university system, meaning I spent the better part of four years of my life drinking nauseatingly sweet grain alcohol mixed with Kool-Aid,” says Emily Sarah, managing partner of a financial advice company in Buenos Aires. When psychologist Florencia Martinez, a native of Gualeguaychu in Argentina’s Entre Rios province, first sipped it, the verdict was straightforward: she poured it away in horror.He’s still baffled by the fact that Argentinians pair the beverage with food at dinners and social events. It may have been born in Italy, but it has been bred around the world. Specifically, in 1860 it was commercialised in Argentina (where a majority of the population claimed Italian heritage) and a factory was opened in Buenos Aires in 1935. Fernet con Cola is now ubiquitous with Argentinian drinking culture – it’s said that Argentinians consume more than three times the amount consumed on home soil in Italy.

This cookie is set by Rubicon Project to control synchronization of user identification and exchange of user data between various ad services. Perhaps its most important watershed moment in the bartending community, however, began in San Francisco, where, today, 70% of its consumption in the US goes down. Someone who has a good knowledge of its industry appeal there is Antoinette Cattani who was professionally slinging Fernet-Branca at bartenders during the late nineties. Having moved from LA to San Francisco to take on the brand, she took what was already a bit of a bartender’s secret and magnified it. Trying it out was like a kiss, a bitter kiss that burns your tongue and makes your eyes close in disgust.” After that she wouldn’t “get her nose close to a bottle of Fernet for many years,” preferring gin and tonic.What does Fernet Branca taste like? “Imagine a Negroni’s nightmare and you’re not far off,” says Frank Fellows, a chef who’s had more shots of Fernet Branca than you’ve had hot dinners. Frank is the Frank behind Frank’s Vegan Kitchen and one of the many pan shakers out there who enjoys a Fernet at the end of every service. “The first time I drank Fernet was after my first meal at St John Bread & Wine,” Frank tells Mob, “the chef told me it would help after I’d inhaled so much bone marrow.” Speaking as a man who has eaten too much bone marrow on more than one occasion, I can confirm that chef was right. Digliardi, who moved to Buenos Aires in 2008, recalls his grandfather drinking Fernet as a digestif with a glass of hot water.

Juan Chico, manager of BARTOK bar and restaurant in the upscale Palermo neighborhood in Buenos Aires, says Fernet is the most widely consumed liquor in the restaurant. At night, especially during weekends, youngsters and older people alike roam the streets with their containers of mixed drinks. Whatever Argentina’s drinkers are suffering from, clearly this “disgusting” Italian medicine is the cure. While my friends in San Francisco will argue Fernet-Branca is best served as a shot, it is traditionally served over plenty of ice a with a slice of lemon or orange. In Argentina they drink Fernet-Branca long over ice mixed with seven parts cola. The drink is so popular there that the Branca family set up a distillery in Buenos Aires in 1935.Once blended, these various different botanical macerations are aged for 12 months in huge Slovenian oak vats of between 15,000 and 20,000 litres each. These vats are beautiful examples of the cooper's craft and incredibly there are more than 300 of them in the cellars of the distillery. But the subtlest aspect of the book is its underlying theme. It's no coincidence that the Italian words for "strange" and "foreigner" are cognate. Anyone able to gain legal entry to Australia can become an Australian, but however long you live in Italy and however proficient you may be in the language, you can no more become Italian than you can Welsh. Thus foreigners who live there have a tendency to become ... well, a bit strange. In Gerald's case this takes many forms, not least continually singing - very loudly, from Marta's point of view - extracts from imaginary arias whose lyrics consist of the Italian for "Please don't litter" and "See date on base of tin". Having played this game, my only regret is that no space could be found for a personal favourite, the very moving (at least to smokers) "Fumare è severamente vietato, ah!" from Bellini's Norma di Legge. Although the bar displays an array of spirit and wine bottles, Chico sells on average 70 glasses of Fernet a day. He claims that the central Argentine city of Cordoba alone consumes more Fernet than all of Italy, largely because of its strong Italian heritage. Budgets weren’t big but Cattani shifted samples, did discounts and held industry nights in dive bars, tying Fernet-Branca together with music and art: “I went to the places no-one else wanted to go.” With bartenders recommending the drink to their customers and an injection of budget in the early 2000s, she could do things on a much bigger scale, rewarding bars with parties, throwing huge Roaring 20s events and building the legacy of the Fernet-Branca we know today: “I had Fernet tunnel vision, all day, every day.”

Totally disgusting,” she confesses, letting out a “bleargh” and lowering her eyebrows, still outraged by the memory. According to official courses, the Fernet Branca recipe is made of a mélange of 27 herbs, roots and spices. The exact ratio of those ingredients remains a closely guarded secret but some of the most notable include rhubarb, camomile, cinnamon, peppermint oil, and saffron. It’s that combination of peppermint oil and saffron which gives Fernet its toothpaste-adjacent menthol flavour. Some sourcesclaim that the Branca family is responsible for an estimated 75% of the world’s saffron consumption, controlling the market price of it like the spice mined on Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune.We met here for the first time, the womanizer Fernet I had heard so much about,” romanticizes Yasmin Simeonova, an architect from Macedonia working in Buenos Aires. There was such a love for Fernet here that had been behind the bar for 40 years,” she tells me of the passing down of Fernet to new bartending generations. “The magic just started happening. I was doing probably 25 events a month with guys and girls promoting it and working with the distributor. I was so obsessed with it, there was so much passion, it was so contagious and all about the bartenders. I had 35-50 of the best bartenders in San Francisco and we just went crazy with it.”