Amaro L'Orvietan 1603 50CL

The oldest amaro in the world and a damn fine one at that, Amaro L’Orvietan dates all the way back to 1603 and has possibly the most incredible back story of any drink that we know.  Drunk by such luminaries as King Louis XIV of France (The Sun King), Voltaire, Balzac and Moliere, L’Orvietan drips with history.  Please read the extended history below the tasting notes, it’s quite a journey.  As one of our staff commented, ‘If it’s good enough for the Sun King, it’s good enough for us’.  We wholeheartedly agree.

L’Orvietan is produced using a cold infusion of over 25 different herbs, which are later pressed and aged in wooden barrels for at least a year.

Tasting Notes and Description

• Appearance: Mist-yellow colour.
• Aroma & Taste: The flavour profile is characterized as dry and herbal, with a "lightly medicinal" profile that is only slightly bitter. It provides a complex, traditional amaro experience focused on herbal rather than sweet notes.
• Alcohol Content: Approximately 30% vol.

Usage and Benefits

• Consumption: Traditionally enjoyed straight as a digestivo, but can also be added to hot or cold drinks.
  
• Benefits: Historically praised for aiding digestion, purifying the liver, and acting as a tonic.
  
• Origin:  Orvieto in Umbria, Italy
  

Extended History

L’Orvietan is a bitter, an after dinner digestive, obtained from the maceration in a hydroalcoholic solution of over 25 herbs. The name, L’Orvietan, refers both to the
original inventor and to its place of origin. The first Orvietan was Girolamo Ferranti who on June 9, 1603 obtained the license for its sale on the public market
from the City of Orvieto.

The fame of L’Orvietan spread to all the principal marketplaces of Europe, conquering both the people and the nobility. Its far reaching popularity was connected to the figure of the itinerant venders of medicinal potions. It became particularly well known in France where Cristoforo Contugi, who had inherited the secret blend from Ferranti, obtained the royal privilege and right to exclusively sell it from the Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1647. He then shrewdly used the sun as his logo.

“The user was told to take a quantity the size of a pea mornings, dissolved in wine or hot broth, or as a pill, and it would… marvelously help your digestion, avoid stomach pains, difficulty in breathing, stop the vapors from rising to the brain…”
L’Orvietan was all the rage for around two hundred years, with various more or less secret formulas. In 1655 Johannes Schröder published a recipe of his own for
“L’Orvietan” in his treatise Pharmacopeia Medico- Chymica, after which it was the pharmacists who continued to produce this famous elixir. Pharmaceutical vases
that bear the words “L’Orvietan” to identify their contents can be found in many of the historical pharmacies of Europe.

It seems to have been a universally known potion for protection against poisons, or even as a cure for love sickness. Reference to this miraculous concoction appears in Sir Walter Scott Kenilworth and The Talisman, Molière L’Amour Médecin, Voltaire Pot-pourri, and Balzac La Père Goriot among others. It became so ubiquitous that up to the end of the nineteenth century the word “Orvietano” in the European dictionaries was defined as the “famous antidote invented in Orvieto”. Even Francis Parkman, author of

The Oregon Trail, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West - 1869, describes how Hennepin, a missionary who lived with the Sioux, “dosed (the Indians) with L’Orvietan, the famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good supply”.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Le Paulmier and Planchon, two French pharmacists published various formulas of this famous panacea taken from old documents and pharmaceutical treatises. Recently in a new study published by the National Academy of Sciences Letters and Arts in Modena, Patrizia Catellani and
Renzo Consoli established which elements, among the 35 formulas recovered, were to be used in an ideal recipe for L’Orvietan.

So now here you have L’Orvietan, bottled in its original and secret formula, once more part of the story of liqueurs and elixirs. To be downed in one draught or savored
in small sips.