Vecchio Magazzino Roger Amaro Tenere Sotto Banco Liqueur

The label tells you everything: "Tenere Sotto Banco" — Keep Under the Counter. This is what you put behind the register and tell your best customers about. Vecchio Magazzino Doganale named it that way deliberately. The name is the pitch.

Roger is an unfiltered Calabrian amaro — deep dark red, naturally cloudy, "turbid from birth" by the producer's own description. All botanicals come from Ivano Trombino's Rural Agricultural Society in Calabria: bitter orange, sweet orange, bergamot, and lemon are infused separately at 80°C; coriander, gentian, quassia, cinchona, and carlina complete the bitter architecture. Production takes nine months. Then forty days of rest in the bottle before it moves. Serve it neat with an orange peel, room temperature or cold, or build it into any classic cocktail that calls for a bitter. It is not for people who find amaro too intense. It is precisely for people who find most amaro not intense enough.

In 1871, a ship loaded with spirits sailed from Panama and wrecked off the coast of Calabria, between Paola and Tropea. Four survivors found shelter at an old customs warehouse — the shop of a spice merchant named Giocondo, who sold contraband spirits under the counter. The survivors were Jefferson, the captain; Roger, the cabin boy; Gil, the ship's doctor; and Egidio Trombino. They vanished from the historical record. Generations later, Ivano Trombino went searching for a grandfather who had left for America and never returned. He found a notebook. He connected the dots. In 2016, Ivano founded Vecchio Magazzino Doganale — the Old Customs Warehouse — and named each bottle in the line after one of the survivors. Roger. Jefferson. Washington. Gil. The whole range is the story. This bottle is where you start.