Maraschino: is wood good?

Luxardo's maraschino and Sangue Morlacco cherry brandy. The blossom is
from Greenwich park here in London and I doubt it is marasca cherry

Maraschino is an ancient cocktail ingredient, a liqueur made from marasca cherries. I used to wonder if it was often used mainly to add sweetness, as the flavour is quite delicate, but I recently had a revelation that changed my thinking.

Maraschino has been made in Dalmatia for hundreds of years but in this country the brand with the highest profile has to be Luxardo. Having said that, it’s not a hugely high-profile product at all—I recently ran out and discovered that no supermarket seems to sell maraschino. They have crème de cassis, crème de pêche, sambuca, etc, but not maraschino. In fact I’m sure the only other brand I’ve ever seen is Briottet, though a Google search shows that there are others available in this country, including examples by the other general liqueur manufacturers such as Giffard and Boudier.

Up to now I’ve mostly used Briottet, because it is cheaper than Luxardo (I think the whole Briottet range are extremely good value). It has a light fruit flavour plus a bitter-almond element that comes from the cherry stones that are included in the fermented pulp. But I recently acquired a bottle of the Luxardo version and I was struck by the difference in flavour. Moreover, as Luxardo had early worldwide success, it made me wonder whether this was the flavour that was intended in all those classic cocktail recipes.

The Luxardo brand goes back almost 200 years, when Girolamo Luxardo was sent as a diplomat from the Kingdom of Sardinia to Zara in Dalmatia, which was then part of the Austrian empire. There was a local tradition of making “rosolio maraschino” from the native marasca cherries, which Girolamo’s wife Maria took an interest in. The couple began to experiment with distilling their own from the cherries in their orchard, apparently after spending some years tinkering with the recipe. They founded a distillery in 1821 and things took off for them when the Austrian emperor gave their brand his stamp of approval and it was soon being exported all over the world. (The distinctive wicker wrapping on the bottle was originally to protect it during sea crossings.)

I must admit that I always thought maraschino was an Italian liqueur and, depending on how you look at it, you could say that it is. Prior to 1797 Dalamatia had been part of the Republic of Venice, and after the First World War part of it (including Zara) joined the Kingdom of Italy. The Second World War led to a change of fortunes for the Luxardo company, which by then was being run by the fourth generation of the family. Heavy bombing destroyed the factory and the orchard was burned. In 1947 the area became part of Yugoslavia and many Italian citizens fled; they were persecuted by Tito’s partisans and many were killed, including Piero and Nicolò Luxardo, and Nicolò’s wife Bianca, who were forcibly drowned.

But Giorgio Luxardo founded a new distillery in Torreglia, in the Veneto region of Italy, and started to rebuild the business. Apparently just one cherry sapling had been saved from the orchard in Zara (now Zadar in modern Croatia), and all the trees in today’s Luxardo orchard are descended from that one. The firm is still being run by the same family, now into its sixth generation.

An Aviation made with Luxardo maraschino.
Apologies for the lack of fine-straining

I’m not sure how other maraschinos are made (there is only talk of “maceration” of cherries) but Luxardo make theirs in a singular way. Cherries are crushed along with their stones (and, I gather, leaves and stalks too) and fermented. The resulting alcoholic soup is distilled to produce an eau de vie that is blended with sugar and water to make a liqueur. But the liqueur is aged for two years in Finnish ashwood vats. (The pulp left over from distillation is infused into alcohol and sugar to make their excellent “Sangue Morlacco” cherry brandy.)

The first thing that hits you on the nose with Luxardo maraschino is actually earthy, dry aromatic wood notes, with a hint of Angostura Bitters. The light cherry fruit comes after that. It is not cloying at all, and has a sweet/dry balance (presumably from wood tannins) and a spiritous heat.

I have a habit of adding a splash of maraschino to Manhattan cocktails, but the specific character of the Luxardo product is lost against the woody power of the whiskey. However, in an Aviation cocktail (roughly two measures of gin, half of maraschino, half of lemon juice and a teaspoon or so of crème de violette) that dry wood flavour is quite noticeable.

I can’t find a reference to any other commercial maraschino wood-ageing its product in the Luxardo way, including the Maraska brand made in Croatia, which claims its recipe dates back to the 16th century. Before Luxardo the Drioli brand was a major player (and a previous holder of the Austrian emperor’s warrant)—it was laid to rest in 1980 but I don’t know how widespread it still was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the cocktail tradition was being developed.*

So it is hard to say if, for example, Hugo Ennslin was using a barrel-aged maraschino when he developed the Aviation (first published in 1918). But it is something to be aware of: if you find many classic cocktails too sweet you should try using Luxardo. And if you have been using it and find your drinks too dry and woody, consider using a different brand.**

* Mind you I did discover this website which says the Drioli brand was obtained by Luxardo and it seems to be in production again, though I don't know how widely distributed it is.

** Apologies for reusing a headline from 2014 but the matter here is essentially the same question: with certain spirits, is wood-ageing actually a Good Thing?

With a cherry on the top: Luxardo Sangue Morlacco

Cherry brandy is one of those ancient cocktail ingredients and, like “apricot brandy”, isn’t really a brandy at all but a liqueur. Typically neutral spirit is infused with crushed cherries, although some posher examples use grape brandy as a starting point. (None of which is to be confused with a spirit made from fermented and distilled cherry juice, such as kirschwasser; maraschino, another cocktail staple, is also a liqueur, made by diluting and sweetening a spirit made from fermented and distilled marasca cherries, and is consequently colourless and tends to be drier and more delicately flavoured than cherry brandy.)

At a recent Candlelight Club event, our mixologist David Hamilton-Boyd included a recipe that specified Luxardo Sangue Morlacco Cherry Liqueur. I’d not heard of this and was interested to find that it is a cherry brandy that is oak-aged for two years. Luxardo are better known for their maraschino, and I gather that this is a by-product: cherries are fermented and then the alcohol is distilled off to make the maraschino. The left-over post-fermentation pulp is what is used to make the Sangue Morlacco, infused into neutral spirit with added sugar. There is a long history to this, and the name Sangue Morlacco—“blood of the Morlaccos”—was given to the drink by the poet Gabriel d’Annunzio in 1919 in respect of its colour, after the fiercely proud Dalmatian warriors who fought for the Republic of Venice and defended their homeland against invading Turks.

Pretty much all cherry boozes seem to include the stone, often grinding it up with the flesh, with the result that the dominant flavour is actually of almond. (It’s hard to conjure the flavour of cherries as distinct from their stones: I happen to have a jar of dark cherries in Luxardo kirsch in the fridge, so I eat one. But mostly you get the texture of the cherry flesh and that almond flavour of the kirsch. In fact while working on this post I open a bottle of red wine that has more of a distinct cherry fruit aroma than any of these spirits.)

I’ve got two other cherry brandies to hand, one by De Kuyper and some Cherry Marnier, by the same folk who make Grand Marnier. These two are quite tawny in colour, whereas the Morlacco is a vibrant purple-red, which is quite impressive after two years in a barrel.

The De Kuyper has a nose of marzipan and much the same on the palate. It is cloyingly sweet and pretty one-dimensional, with a very short finish. The Cherry Marnier is warmer, with darker, more complex flavours. To me it still essentially tastes of almonds, but there are elements of fresh fruit on the nose and palate too. The Sangue Morlacco immediately strikes me as more vinous on the nose, almost as if there were red wine in it—I suppose it does contain fermented cherry juice as well as spirit, and it has spent two years in a barrel. That familiar marzipan note still dominates the aroma and taste, but in the mouth it is less cloying that the others, with pronounced tartness and dry tannins (presumably from the wood) to balance the sugar. There is also a pepperiness on the finish.

There’s no doubt that, out of these three, the Sangue Morlacco is the most interesting, having more balance and depth. But I don’t think I would choose to drink any of them on its own.

The Blood and Sand* is a classic cherry brandy cocktail, so I rustle up a couple, one with De Kuyper and one with Sangue Morlacco. The traditional recipe is equal parts Scotch, cherry brandy, red vermouth and orange juice. I follow Simon Difford’s lead and double the quantity of Scotch (in this case Famous Grouse, with Martini Rosso as the vermouth).

First off, the Morlacco version is quite a different colour, a tawny red, as opposed to the sludge hue of the De Kuyper concoction. On the nose and palate, this latter is dominated by the confectionary almond element, giving it a slight cough-mixture quality. The same cocktail made with Sangue Morlacco is drier, with dark flavours, seemingly more emphasis on the vermouth and something reminiscent of port. It is altogether more of a grown-up drink, methinks. For me, this is where the superior qualities of Luxardo’s Sangue Morlacco come into their own—making cocktails with cherry brandy in them much more palatable.

* This cocktail was created in 1922 to celebrate the new Valentino movie of the same name. It was quite common in those days for movies and plays to be saluted in this way. It doesn’t seem to happen much today, but then would you want to drink a Fast and Furious 3? Or, for that matter, an Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag?