How to Throw a Proper Aperitivo Hour

Our editors are often trying to find excuses to grab drinks with Danielle Callegari and Jeff Porter, who review wines from Italy for the magazine. If you knew our Italian wine reviewers, you’d want to invite them for an aperitivo hour, too. Well, we invited them to come on by and help us test this collection. Now it’s your turn. It’s all here: Stuff for spritzes, wine, splashes, sips and snacks.

When we asked Dr. Callegari (who, in addition to serving as Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College and co-hosting the Gola podcast, is the person you’d most want to get drunk and talk about Dante with) for what she considered aperitivo essentials, she first asked how honest we were being. Then she did not wait and said, “alcohol and cigarettes.” If we are being a little less authentically Florentine or Milanese, she suggests, “really good olives, almonds and potato chips.”

Some of her other essentials are a crisp, salty white wine (such as an Etna Bianco), a proper wine key (see below) and stemless glassware. Why stemless, Dr. Callegari? “So everyone can chill the fuck out.” We’ll leave you to judge just how graceful or clumsy your guests are, a key consideration when deciding whether to put out the hand-blown balloon glasses or the stemless.

Once you have those trusty essentials and maybe some vermouth (try a twist on an espresso martini with coffee vermouth), invite some friends over and make some snacks, like stuzzichini. Fortuitously, our friend Stef Ferrari has recently released her cookbook Stuzzechini: The Art of the Italian Snack, full of recipes for snacks and drinks.

One thing many Americans seem to misunderstand about aperitivo is that it is not Italian-themed happy hour. It is rather a prelude to a meal. “It’s literally about opening the appetite for dinner,” says Dr. Callegari. In Italy, the idea of having a few small bites with a splash of bitters or bubbles has grown over time and expanded to the wonderful practice of “apericena,” which is when one aperitif leads to more. Ferrari calls it “the conflation of aperitivo and dinner.”

Get your aperitivo hour going—or stretch it out into a proper apericena—with the help of this glassware and gear, curated by WE editors.