ABOUT

THE JIGGER SOCIETY

An acclaimed cocktail bar and a historic wine family team up to craft bespoke spirits.

Reggio Emilia, the beautiful small city in Emilia-Romagna, is a gastronome’s paradise: Parmigiano cheese, balsamic vinegar, and Lambrusco wine are some of its signature products, and the creative team behind The Jigger Society has added craft cocktails and spirits to the menu. Jigger Spiriti e Cucina, named the Best Cocktail Bar in Italy in 2016, takes its inspiration not just from the cocktail parlors of New York and London but from its immediate surroundings, sourcing local botanicals (and wine!) for their fledgling line of craft spirits products.

To help introduce their spirituous creations to the world outside Emilia, the Jigger Spiriti e Cucina crew teamed up with the legendary Ermete Medici family, of Lambrusco fame. Fifth-generation proprietor Alessandro Medici, whose family’s benchmark wines are distributed all over the world, has brought this expertise—and some wine—to The Jigger Society: Their Vermouth di Torino, called Esule, is crafted on a base of Lambrusco Salamino wine from Medici’s cellars.

After researching and developing the recipes for both Esule and their compound gin, Jin Q, The Jigger Society team dug deep into history to create identities for these products that were firmly rooted in Emiliano tradition: For Esule (meaning “Exile”), they reference the story of Giuditta Bellerio Sidoli (1804-’71), an activist during Italy’s Risorgimento period who married Giovanni Sidoli, a fellow revolutionary—and Reggio Emilia native—when she was 16. Not long after Giovanni’s death, in 1828, she was exiled to Marseille, where she later took up with another revolutionary, the famed Italian Nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini. Giuditta eventually made it back to Turin, where she hosted political salons in her apartment, and the Esule back label includes an excerpt from one of her letters, which reads, in part: “Of all the places I have called home, two cities I have kept in my heart from the years of my exile. Reggio Emilia, where I wrapped my shoulders with the Tricolore flag, and the great Turin, where the idea of a free and unified Italy was born between parlors of smoke and wine.”

For Jin Q (spelled with a “J” to highlight its origins at Jigger Spiriti e Cucina), the team pays homage to the “primordial” style of gin first popularized in 18th century England, before the advent of the London Dry style. The label references a famous Italian physician and criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who created a mind-soothing elixir whose recipe inspired that of Jin Q. To emphasize Jin Q’s “Reggiano” origins, its makers gave its mascot a square head, or testa quadra—an epithet used by neighbors in Parma and Modena to describe the stubborn nature of the typical Reggiano.