World Liqueur Awards 2020: Amaro Rupes awarded with gold!
Typology: Artisan liqueur
Origin: Calabria - Roccella Jonica
Raw material: alcohol base, water, herbal infusion, wild fennel, licorice and laurel
Formats available: 70 cl
Alcohol: 28%
The Rupes amaro is produced through the old tradition cold method which involves the infusion of a hydroalcoholic solution in large steel vats, for at least twenty days, with high quality medicinal herbs and subsequent reduction of the alcohol content to 28%. Vol by adding water and sugar. The maceration allows the properties of the herbs to be fully extracted, among which bay leaves, fennel and Calabrian licorice stand out, giving the distillate freshness, persistence of taste, character and pleasantness on the palate. This process also allows to extract the bitter active ingredients that stimulate digestion and promote intestinal functions (as evidenced by various scientific studies). The careful selection of herbs has been entrusted to a distillery which, for almost a century, has been refining the art of processing and blending herbs and roots. Rupes is a meditation amaro, with an amber brown color and a unique, unmistakable and balanced flavour; the scent is intense with marked herbaceous notes. Taste it at room temperature or iced (-20°C), sitting at the table at the end of a tasty dinner enjoyed in pleasant company, or perhaps in an armchair at any time of the day, letting your eyes and thoughts wander through delicate images. Hold it for a few seconds in your mouth to be able to perceive the different gustatory sensations and enhance the experience of every single sweet sip.
The legend
It was the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Famine showed its true face through hunger. Laborers and craftsmen were cornered, oppressed by landlords and taxes.
The young Vincenzo lived in Roccella, at the foot of the cliff. He traded basic necessities by loading his goods on his shoulders to supply neighboring countries. Under the counter, only to the most trusted friends, he sold a stomatal of herbal infusions in distillate, personally extracted during the night at the foot of the cliff where he lived, so as not to arouse suspicions in prying eyes. He jealously guarded the recipe handed down to him by his dear mother of the ingredients and the method of making it.
It was on one of those nights while intent on distilling that he met Pietro, a young lawyer from Roccella from a distinguished and good family who met to discuss, together with other friends of the Riviera, in the shadow of the night, a stone's throw from the small illegal distillery .
Vincenzo, initially wary, agreed to let his infusion be tried, which he continued to bring at night for a few years. He never dared to ask what was being talked about in those secret meetings, not even when the confidence was greater. He had intuited, however, that young people were poets, dreamers, bearers and witnesses of a tolerant and respectful morality towards all men and their dignity. Sometimes, after leaving the herbal infusion to be tasted, he heard Pietro calling the liqueur "Rupes" in the distance, raising his glasses to the exclamation "Evviva la Liberà"; "Long live the country".
He never understood why Pietro and his friends shortly thereafter paid for those encounters with their lives, publicly executed.
He jealously kept the secret of having met them and, out of fear, he no longer produced the Rupes so dear to those young people.
Many years passed and Vincenzo, shortly before leaving his earthly life at the end of the 19th century, managed to make a last promise from his son, not before having told him about those young people and their dream of Freedom: "The recipe of Rupes will have to be handed down but the story of those meetings will have to remain a secret for at least a century”; almost as if the fear of that despot and overbearing Kingdom still hovered, now a legacy of the past
The promise was kept. That recipe was jealously guarded and handed down from father to son for four generations.
