It’s hardly a shock that the Cynar Julep is an Argentine classic. Between bitter amaro and lemon juice, cooling mint and tart grapefruit, it’s a marriage of extremes, a palate that matches a culture in a never-ending cycle of crisis and bliss. It could belong to anyone and any time. But it’s a time stamp of a very specific moment of the country’s—and its cocktail culture’s—history. And it all began with a sunset.
It was 2004 and Santiago Lambardi was on a weekend trip with his friends. As night fell after a long day, he got lost in the last rays of pink and orange, and the vast Argentine grasslands below. He couldn’t shake the image from his mind.
“Everything starts with a visual,” Lambardi explains. “That sunset stuck in my head, the way the red, pink and green all met with one another.”
Lambardi took that image back with him to Sucre, an ambitious new bar and restaurant on Buenos Aires’ northern edge. Argentine food and drink culture revolves around sharing—bottles of wine and family-size plates of food—and Sucre wanted to pull serious bar culture out of the city’s grand hotels and into the emerging dining scene.
In 2004, ambition had all the chips stacked against it. Argentina was in the middle of its crisis cycle. The 1960s and ’70s were stained by state terrorism before a bittersweet combo of democracy and runaway inflation washed over the 1980s like a rogue wave. The 1990s sutured dire finances with neoliberalism, pumping the country full of cash through the sale of public works, international loans and newly opened economic borders.
The ’90s was the era of “pizza with champagne.” For a brief moment, when the dollar and peso aligned one to one, the middle class began to travel, shop and dance until they dropped. For young bartenders, it was an exhilarating moment of endless possibility, a chance to participate on the global stage. They could travel to bars in Europe and the United States. Shelves were flooded with imported bottles. Liqueurs, canned juices and preserved fruits were replaced with fresh ingredients, picked by hand from the city’s markets. And the bartenders of the old-school, traditionalist bars passed the baton to the up-and-comers.
Lambardi got his start under Eugenio Gallo, a legendary bartender of Argentina’s first Golden Age of cocktails. “Bartenders like him made us want to rescue the prestige and craft of bartending that was lost in the ’80s,” he says. “I’ll never forget coming into the bar and watching him shave ice cubes down to the same size, so that every one would melt exactly the same in the glass.”
As the holidays approached in 2001, everything fell apart. The government defaulted on massive foreign debt, and overnight, the peso and dollar jumped to three to one, blanketing the country with violent social unrest and a fog of uncertainty.
“We got used to the feeling that there were no limits to what we could do,” recalls Pablo Pignatta, who tended the bar of a late-night bartender hangout called Mundo Bizarro. “Suddenly, all we had were limitations. There were so many recipes we couldn’t prepare anymore.”
Importers stopped bringing in new products and hoarded existing supplies under lock and key. Vodka, gin and rum virtually disappeared, and the popular drinks fit for a Sex and the City viewing party—Cosmos, Appletinis and Mojitos—needed creative new alternatives. Lambardi experimented with what was readily available, starting with amari, vermouths and liqueurs that were domestically produced.
“We always had amaros on the shelf. But no one ever drank them and we didn’t really know what to do with them,” recounts Lambardi, despite Argentina’s storied history of amari, vermouth and bitter liqueurs. “That was stuff your grandparents drank at home. We’d keep it on hand in the rare case that some foreigner asked for a digestif.”
A julep was an obvious choice—the mint representing the bright, grassy expanse from that fateful sunset. In the original recipe, one part gin adds a pop to three parts Cynar, which was mixed and topped with citrus-flavored Schweppes to create a gradient effect. It quickly caught on, becoming a bartender favorite replicated in bars around the city. Over time, the gin was removed and grapefruit juice replaced Schweppes when it became too hard to track down from purveyors.
This year, the Cynar Julep celebrates its 20th birthday. It was ahead of its time, a precursor to today’s amaro revival and explosion of craft vermouth and bitters. A vestige of the stiff, homegrown concoctions of old-school drinking culture (like the Clarito, an extra-dry Martini or the fernet- and vermouth-based Ferroviario). Some say it’s Buenos Aires’ last great classic, before the complicated rotovaps and fat washes of today took over, a drink that can be anyone’s bittersweet accompaniment—for crisis or bliss—for a long glance into the sunset.