Enzoni
The Enzoni is a Negroni spliced with a sour, and the graft is five muddled grapes. Gin and Campari come from the first family, lemon and sugar from the second, and the grapes hold the two together. They do it by carrying two inheritances at once. The juice sweetens the way syrup would, and the skins bring a gentle tannin that structures the drink the way vermouth might. Wine's raw materials standing in where wine would ordinarily be, which is why the finished drink reads as vinous without a wine bottle anywhere near it. It is credited to Vincenzo Errico, the same bartender behind the Red Hook, around 2003. Errico worked in both the New York and London rooms of Milk & Honey and the sources differ on which this came out of, so it is more honest to leave that open than to pick one. Two grafts in the same year, both permanent, is a considerable record.
Glassware: Rocks Glass
Garnish: Grapes or two on a pick
Ingredients
45ml
The Negroni's seat, kept. Juniper frames the graft, and it is the only thing in the glass that is not either sweet, sour or bitter.
22.5ml
Three-quarters of a Negroni measure, because the grapes and the lemon are both doing work vermouth would otherwise do. At a full thirty it flattens the fruit entirely.
5, muddled
The graft, carrying two jobs: juice sweetening as syrup would, skins structuring as vermouth might. Seedless, and burst rather than pasted, because ground skins turn astringent.
15ml
The sour family's contribution, at fifteen millilitres. Short of a full sour measure because the grapes bring acidity of their own as well as sugar.
10ml
Ten millilitres and no more. The grapes sweeten, so the syrup is a correction rather than the sweetener, and matching it to the lemon turns the drink into a fruit cup.
Instructions
Muddle the grapes in the shaker until the skins burst.
Add the gin, Campari, lemon juice and simple syrup.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.
Garnish with a few grapes on a stick.
Expert Tip
Burst the grapes rather than pasting them. A few firm presses is enough to split the skins and release the juice. Grind them and you extract the harsher tannins from skin and pulp, and the drink turns astringent in a way no amount of syrup will fix. Use seedless grapes. Crushed seeds are bitter in a completely different register from Campari's bitterness, and the two do not get along. Keep the syrup at ten millilitres. The grapes bring their own sugar and the recipe is balanced against that. Match the lemon millilitre for millilitre and the drink turns into a fruit cup with Campari in it.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The drink is credited to Vincenzo Errico, who named it after himself: Enzo is the short form, and Enzoni is Enzo plus Negroni.
Errico is also the bartender behind the Red Hook, and both drinks date from around 2003, which is a considerable year's work. He worked in both the New York and London rooms of Milk & Honey and sources differ on which one this came out of, so it is better to leave the question open than to assert an answer.
What the pair demonstrates is two entirely different problem-solving methods. The Red Hook engineered its way around a missing bottle. The Enzoni grafts two drink families together using a fruit bowl.
The Grape Graft
Five muddled grapes is an odd instruction until you understand what they replace.
A Negroni is gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. Take the vermouth out and you lose two things: sweetness, and a certain structural roundness that comes from the wine and the botanicals steeped in it.
Grape juice supplies the sweetness. Grape skins supply a gentle tannin, which is the same compound that gives red wine its structure, and it does a version of what the vermouth was doing. Between them they cover both jobs, and the drink reads as vinous with no wine in it.
White grapes keep the glass golden; red ones blush it towards rosé. Both are correct and the difference is largely visual.
The Family Splice
Negroni bones, sour muscles. Gin and Campari come from one constitution and lemon and sugar from the other, and the fruit is the treaty between them.
That makes it unusually good at converting people in both directions. Negroni drinkers who find sours frivolous meet one with a genuinely bitter spine; sour drinkers who find Campari punishing meet it at three-quarter strength with fruit and acid around it.
It sits alongside the Jasmine as one of the two great gateway drinks for Campari, and the two work by opposite methods: the Jasmine creates a grapefruit that is not there, and the Enzoni brings real fruit to the party.
Burst, Never Paste
The muddling is the one place this drink goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a way that cannot be corrected afterwards.
Grape skins carry a gentle tannin at light pressure and a harsh, astringent one under heavy grinding. A few firm presses to split the skins and release the juice is the whole job. A minute of enthusiastic muddling extracts everything, and the result is drying and bitter in a register that clashes with the Campari rather than complementing it.
Seedless grapes, always. Crushed seeds are bitter in yet another direction, and none of the three get along.
How to Serve It
Muddled, shaken with everything else, double strained over fresh ice in a rocks glass, with a few grapes picked onto a stick.
Aperitivo hour. It pours well the same evening as the Red Hook if you want to see one bartender's two methods side by side: one stirred and engineered, one muddled and grafted.
The Spirit
GinA flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an Enzoni?
A Negroni spliced with a sour: gin and Campari over five muddled grapes, with lemon and a short measure of sugar syrup. Vincenzo Errico built it around 2003 and named it after himself. The grapes stand in for the sweet vermouth.
White or red grapes?
Both work and the difference is mostly visual. White keeps the drink golden; red blushes it towards rosé. Use seedless either way, because crushed seeds bring a bitterness that clashes with the Campari. Firm ripe grapes muddle better than soft ones.
What do the grapes replace?
Sweet vermouth. Their juice supplies the sweetness and their skins a gentle tannin that does a version of the vermouth's structural job, which is why the drink reads as vinous with no wine in it.
How does it relate to the Red Hook?
Same bartender, same year, opposite methods. The Red Hook engineered its way around a bottle that no longer exists; the Enzoni grafts two drink families together with fruit. Few people have two of these take.
Master the Techniques
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Negroni
The Negroni is the most ordered classic cocktail in the world and the drink that defined the contemporary revival. It is also one of the simplest: equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth, stirred and served over ice with an orange peel. That simplicity is a function of how precisely the three are calibrated against one another. The story most commonly told places Count Camillo Negroni at the Caffè Casoni in Florence in 1919, asking Fosco Scarselli to strengthen his Americano by replacing the soda with gin. The account is debated; the structure is not. Both drinks share the same base of Campari and sweet vermouth, and that one substitution turns a sessionable aperitif into one of the most spirit-forward short drinks there is. The sweet vermouth is the most commonly neglected variable. At equal volume it is a third of the drink rather than a background ingredient, and a bottle left open at room temperature for months will define a Negroni more completely than the gin does, with no amount of good Campari correcting it.
Jasmine
The Jasmine is the modern classic that performs a magic trick: gin, Campari, orange liqueur and lemon, and the finished drink tastes, unmistakably and to everybody who tries it, of pink grapefruit. Paul Harrington built it in 1990s California for a friend named Jasmin, published it in his pioneering book Cocktail, and the accidental grapefruit has been converting drinkers ever since. The illusion is arithmetic. Campari’s bitter orange plus Cointreau-style sweetness plus lemon’s acid lands precisely on grapefruit’s coordinates, so three ingredients triangulate a fourth fruit that never enters the glass at all. It is the drinks world’s favourite proof that flavour is construction rather than contents. It drinks as a dry, blush-pink sour with a properly bitter finish, and it is one of the great Campari gateways for the aperitivo-shy: the bitterness arrives dressed as fruit, and by the time anybody notices they are two in and asking questions about Negronis.
Red Hook
The Red Hook is a Brooklyn that can actually be made. The original calls for Amer Picon, a French bitter orange aperitif that stopped reaching America decades ago and was reformulated at home as well, so every Brooklyn recipe arrives with an argument attached about what to use instead. Enzo Errico's answer, built at Milk & Honey in 2003, was to stop substituting and start rebuilding. Punt e Mes is a sweet vermouth with a bitter edge already in it, so it covers the vermouth and the missing amer in one bottle. The maraschino then doubles from the Brooklyn's barspoon to a full fifteen millilitres, which gives the cherry something to say rather than leaving it as a trace. Three bottles, one stir, no arguments. It also started a genre: Greenpoint, Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens and a dozen more take this frame and change one bottle, and the borough-naming habit of the 2000s begins here.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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