The best part of a Negroni — the Italian cocktail made with gin, Campari and sweet vermouth — is feeling like you just bit into an orange, peel and all.
The best part of a canned Negroni is probably just that it comes in a can.
Wine company Pampelonne has unveiled a line of canned summery wine cocktails, including a Watermelon Americano, a Black Cherry Bicicletta and, most intriguingly, a Negroni Sbagliato, which swaps out the gin for sparkling wine. An appropriately thirsty feed of promotional images shows the drinks ($17 for a pack of four) being consumed via straw in a luxuriant candle-lit bath, poolside in Boca Raton and on a rooftop, overlooking majestic hot-air balloons at sunset. To consume is to aspire.
Over a regular Negroni at Travel Bar in Carroll Gardens, a friend who happens to speak Italian informs me that “sbagliato” means mistake. The Negroni Sbagliato is said to be the happy result of a rushed bartender who accidentally picked up the wrong bottle of booze — essentially, it’s the “my bad!” of the cocktail world. Imbibe magazine recommends making it with equal parts sweet vermouth, Campari and sparkling wine instead of gin, plus an orange wheel for garnish.
Pampelonne’s canned version hits you first with carbonation and then the faint funkiness of wine, followed by a slight taste of Italian bitters. It’s like somebody dropped a couple Smarties into a white wine spritzer. The trademark bitterness of the Negroni is there, though only subtly.
Its carbonation is not dissimilar to that of a prosecco or Champagne, but it also tastes eerily similar to a spiked La Croix. Which is basically what this is: Among the ingredients of the 120-calorie canned cocktail are wine and carbonated water.
For me, drinking it out of the can was the worst part, both aromawise and tastewise. But I can see why the can itself would also be the best part: it’s discreet enough to sip in public. (Listen, I’m almost 30. I’m a little old to be hiding my vices. But there may come a time — like a particularly long commute to Jamaica, Queens — when a little extra discretion may come in handy.)
Could I see myself drinking this canned Negroni Sbagliato and its Italian cousins on a sandy oasis? Absolutely. Did I feel incredibly great drinking it by myself during last Wednesday’s musical episode of CW’s “Riverdale,” pantsless but also very much bundled up? I did not.
The canned Negroni Sbagliato has its time and place. It’s not at a bar, discussing the Italian interpretation of a beloved cocktail. And it’s not on an Ikea couch, watching Archie Andrews lament that “God it’s rough, stayin’ tough.” But God it’s rough waiting for summer, when a beachy carefree vibe is only a can away.
