These Amari Deserve a Spot in Your Bar Cart

This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what we’re eating, drinking, and buying. Here, writer Sam Stone shouts out modern-style amari that are perfect for summer sipping.

Leslie Merinoff, a cofounder of Matchbook Distilling Company, definitely did not start brewing experimental fruit wines when she was a teenager. That would be illegal. To be clear, her first experimental brew wasn’t a mint Champagne, and she didn’t go on to home-brew beer in college. Suffice to say, Merinoff had some experience when she entered the spirits industry after college, which then led her to open her own distillery in 2018 in Greenport, New York.

What was initially meant to be a contract distillery—a company that makes custom spirits for others—Matchbook instead produced its own line of delightfully offbeat bottles using ingredients sourced from local farms. Think a roasty, toasty liqueur inspired by the Maillard reaction made with oats, brown butter, and brown sugar crafted in collaboration with the Culinary Institute of America. Or a smoky mezcal-inspired spirit made with roasted sunchokes.

“These spirits were so much fun to make, and farms were happy to be selling more [of their crop],” Merinoff says. “We all just started to scale together, and it kind of eclipsed our contract business.”

Nestled in Matchbook’s trove of fascinating spirits is a trio of my new favorite amari: the sweet and airy Daytrip Peach, a floral and bitter Daytrip Strawberry, and a subtle, dry Fieldtrip Squash.

Let’s get one thing straight: These are not the amari you’re likely familiar with. Whereas traditional amari tend toward a robust herbaceousness, Matchbook’s puts the fruit front and center. That doesn’t always mean sweetness—in fact the Fieldtrip Squash Amaro is dry as a bone. But in these spirits, fruit works in tandem with herbs like nettle, cassia, and jasmine to make a layered aperitif with a sweet-sultry-bitter-juicy profile.

While the dry Fieldtrip Squash Amaro, with warming notes of cinnamon and cacao, works well as a swap for sherry in something like an Adonis Spritz, Daytrip Peach is charismatic enough to be the foundation for an Amaro Spritz. With its mouthwatering sweet-bitter balance, Daytrip Strawberry Amaro, perhaps my favorite of the three (though don’t tell the others, they’ll get jealous), would make a head-turning version of an Americano.

On their own or on the rocks, this trio of surprising amari—perhaps more like the zany stepchild of amaro and vermouth—is on track to be foundational to my warm-weather drinking routine.