This Sparkling Negroni Became a Meme. Here's a Better Way to Make It.

The Negroni Sbagliato kicks off a month of Negronis.

September may be the hardest month to program for cocktails. 

It’s still hot, at least along the Eastern seaboard, where this week temperatures stretched upwards toward the 100-degree mark. But in a week or so, highs will have dropped to a balmy mid-70s. 

Meanwhile, after Labor Day, there are no major holidays or special events. There is nothing in particular to define September. It’s just the month you go back to school or work in earnest after the summer stretch. What does one drink during a month that’s so variable, so busy, and so lacking in distinctive events or character? 

What a month like September calls for is a drink for all seasons, something straightforward and unfussy, something that fits into a busy back-to-school, back-to-work schedule, something that fits into any sort of weather. 

Fortunately, such a drink exists. It’s the Negroni, one of the most popular drinks of the last two decades — by some rankings it’s the most popular cocktail at cocktail-focused bars — and one of the most versatile. The Negroni is a simple, succinct, three-ingredient wonder that will conform to any weather, any schedule, any activity, any mood. It can be bright and fruity or bitter and strong, light and playful or brooding and serious. It’s the all-purpose, anytime, never-goes-wrong drink. 

And, as it happens, September is already home to a celebration of the drink. Indeed, I may have slightly erred when I said that there are no holidays or major events in September after Labor Day: That’s probably true for most folks you might ask on the street. But cocktail fans know that September is the month that brings us Negroni Week, the annual festival of Negronis and Negroni-esque cocktails promoted by the great booze magazine Imbibe.

As always, I recommend checking out Imbibe’s hub for the event and patronizing the many bars that take part. But you can also make Negronis and Negroni-esque cocktails at home — and when you are your own bartender you don’t have to wait for Negroni week’s official start. If Negroni Week is good, it stands to reason that Negroni Month is even better. You can never drink too many Negronis.¹

So for most of this month we will be making Negronis, and will will be starting with one that follows from our recent explorations of the Collins category. 

This week’s cocktail is not a Collins, but it does overlap in some important ways. It’s a not-quite-long drink, a sort of partial Negroni filled out with sparkling wine. 

Yea, it’s the Negroni…Sbagliato…with, well, maybe not with Prosecco. 

This drink went amazingly and unexpectedly viral last year thanks to a short clip in which two of the lead performers from HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon interviewed each other. The big viral moment came when Olivia Cooke asked Emma D'Arcy about drink preferences. And D'Arcy replied: “A Negroni…Sbagliato…with Prosecco.”  Stunning.

I didn’t write about it at the time for a couple of reasons. First, I’d already written a House of the Dragon-themed cocktail column, and two seemed like overkill. Second, I don’t think of this newsletter as the right forum for quick-hit write ups of meme drinks of the moment. That’s especially true when — as is the case with the Sbagliato — I rarely order or make the drink in question.  

The reason why I don’t often order the Negroni Sbagliato, despite my fondness for all things Negroni, is that I think most versions are not made especially well.

The Negroni Sbagliato is not a drink that most bars workshop or focus on. As some of the participants in Punch’s recent Negroni Sbagliato recipe competition noted, most bartenders don’t have a preferred spec or an idealized version of the drink. It’s just a kinda-sorta Negroni but with sparkling wine instead of gin, and it’s not particularly rigorous. Because of that lack of focus and formal structure, the drink often suffers from a looseness that just doesn’t appeal to me. 

But it’s a good drink idea — a sort of bubbly love child of the Negroni, the Americano, and the French 75. It’s the sort of cocktail concept that should be able to produce an excellent drink. 

And with a bit of thought, it can, especially if you apply some of the techniques and lessons we learned from making Collins-style drinks over the last few weeks. 

The Negroni Mistake

The Negroni Sbagliato’s name means something like “mistaken Negroni” or “broken Negroni,” which is appropriate, because common versions of this drink suffer from a number of problems.

Here are the problems with most renditions of the Negroni Sbagliato: 

• They are either too fizzy and too heavy on the sparkling wine — or they are not fizzy enough, with barely enough bubbles to give the drink the effervescent lift it needs. 

• In addition, far too many are just too soft, thanks to the use of too-sweet Prosecco. Like the month of September, or Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry, they lack clarity and definition.

• Finally, the integration between the Negroni elements — vermouth and Campari — and the sparkling element is often somewhat haphazard, with the boozier bits sunk to the bottom while you sip the carbonated stuff off the top. 

Fortunately, these are all solvable problems. 

Let’s take these in order.