Maraschino history

The role of the old Hapsburg Empire in the creation of a cocktail cabinet stalwart.

There’s an old joke about Lebanese politics:  if you think you understand it, then it obviously hasn’t been properly explained to you. I feel that way when reading about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My word it’s a confusing business. It was ruled by the Austrian Habsburg family but there were so many different people and rather than living in defined areas like the English in England or the French in France, they lived intermingled with each other. There were Croats, Poles, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Romanians and others all rubbing up against each other. There were Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims. Then there were people whose names mean little to modern eyes: Ruthenians, Galicians, Slavonians, who mustn't be confused with Slovakians or indeed Slovenians. In fact the empire is at times reminiscent of that great spoof history 1066 and All That:

‘The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).’

My grandmother on my mother’s side, Margareta Mörtlebauer, was a child of that muddled old empire. She was born in what is now the independent country of Slovenia, she left after the First World War when Austria-Hungary was defeated and  her home became part of Yugoslavia, and her family moved to the now tiny state of Austria. Later she went to London, became a housekeeper in Streatham, met my grandfather, Rinaldo Castiglione an Anglo-Italian and moved to near Aberdeen.

We called her Scottish granny but she was always more comfortable speaking German and spoke English with a thick Austrian accent. Where she was brought up there would have been Slavic, German and Italian speakers. To this day the border with Italy is highly porous and would have been even during Communist times. Simon Winder in his book Danubia, a brave attempt to explain the Habsburgs, refers to the area as ‘a sort of linguistic mudslide.’ 

Modern day Slovenia, however, has had a relatively straightforward history compared with a town called Zadar on the Dalmatian coast in what is now Croatia.  Here east meets west, Islam meets Christianity and Northern Europe meets the Southern. Zadar was once part of another great defunct Empire, the Ottoman, until it was ceded to Venice at the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz. The Venetians called it Zara and its character became less Croat and more Italian. Then from 1806 until 1918 it entered the Habsburg sphere. The town would have been highly cosmopolitan with Croatian, Italian and German all being widely spoken as well as minorities of Jews, Serbs, Bosnians, Armenians etc. After the defeat of Austria in the First World War, the Empire was dissolved and Zara became part of a united Italy. Later after Italy’s defeat in Second World War it became part of Yugoslavia, and then part of an independent Croatia, and the name reverted to Zadar.

Are you still with me? Perhaps it might be more enlightening to look at a family who lived in the city. Girolamo Luxardo, originally from Genoa, arrived in Zara with his wife Maria Canevari in 1817. Here she made a liqueur out of the maraschino cherries native to the region. At last a drinks angle! They founded the firm of Luxardo to manufacture the liqueur in 1821. They built a huge ornate distillery (above) which though it was bombed during the war, was rebuilt and stands to this day.

But all the family’s assets were seized when Zara became part of communist Yugoslavia following Italy’s defeated in the Second World War. Most of the city’s Italian population left too. The state created a socialist version of the famous liqueur called Maraska which is still made to this day. There’s a very good blog on the subject which I recommend reading.

Despite this disaster, the Luxardo family didn’t give up. Instead they moved to Veneto in mainland Italy and carried on making its Luxardo Maraschino. Similar liqueurs had been made by monasteries since the early middle ages, Maria Canevari’s original recipe was an Italian take on a Dalmatian speciality (the other great Dalmatian speciality being big spotty dogs). It’s now made from Italian cherries. Rather than being a flavoured liqueur, it’s actually distilled from the cherries* and the pits themselves, and then diluted and sweetened. So it shares a heritage with fruit brandies such a slivovitz, made from plums across Eastern Europe. But whilst these brandies have a somewhat fearsome reputation, Luxardo maraschino is all about sophistication.

It’s sweet and smooth but it also has an earthy, nutty taste from the cherry pits. Its richness and complexity provide an essential ingredient in many cocktails.  In his excellent book on cocktails The Spirits, the author Richard Godwin (worth following on Substack) writes: ‘you can generally tell someone who’s serious about cocktails by whether they own a bottle of maraschino.’ Luxardo not only provides a sweet cherry taste but that nuttiness adds depth to such classics as the Brooklyn, the Tuxedo, the Martinez and the Aviator.

It might now be thought of as distinctly Italian liqueur but looks closely and you’ll see that embossed on the bottle is the double-headed eagle, the symbol of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire because it looks both east and west.

*Amendment from someone from Luxardo: “It’s made with the pulp, pits, leaves, stems, twigs and small branches (not the cherries themselves). The leaves, stems, twigs etc are what give it a herbaceous and floral note that make it ideal to partner with gin. Luxardo actually still uses the same cherry strain it used in Zara, because it has been cultivating this strain for over 200 years and moved it to a new terroir.  It has evolved and now has its own genus- the Luxardo Marasca Cherry”.