A blessing under the bitter notes

I’ve always loved the final scene in the 2012 Batman flick The Dark Knight Rises. Gotham City is saved, and the camera takes us to a small café in Florence, on the banks of the Arno. Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred is on a much-needed holiday, sipping a glass of Fernet Branca, when, surprisingly, he meets the gaze of Mr. Wayne himself, who was presumed dead.

Who doesn’t love a happy ending? Though I’ll confess I was every bit as interested in what was in Alfred’s glass as I was in the survival of Gotham’s strangest billionaire. Alfred is played by the septuagenarian Michael Caine, as cool as ever, his Cockney edginess now married to a genial and warm old-world charm. Who wouldn’t want to have a drink with Michael Caine?

So I set out to the provincial pharmacy and sourced a bottle of Fernet Branca, among the most famous of the manifold Italian amari or bitters. I poured a dram, sniffed it, tipped it back, and almost spat it right out.

How to describe it? Let’s go with “strong shoe polish vibes”. . .

Thanks, Mr. Caine.

Maybe I should’ve expected it to be this way. Fernet Branca is a concoction of gentian root, bitter aloe, myrrh, cinchona bark, angelica, peppermint and more. Most of which rarely make my Bulk Barn shopping list.

Half true at best

However: as I write, I’m just days past my 43rd birthday, more than 10 years on from taking that bibulous inspiration from Michael Caine, and I find myself reaching for that old bottle again, just to see.

And you know, it’s not terrible. Maybe even kind of . . . good?

What’s changed? Not the Fernet – it’s had the same recipe since 1845, back when it was marketed as an anti-choleric. I suppose it’s me, then, who’s gone through some changes, drank a bitter cup or two, found an appreciation for things I thought I didn’t care for. This isn’t the way it usually goes; typically we think the spirit itself is what needs to grow older, to age in a barrel somewhere before it’s palatable. But in this case I was the one who needed to age.

In our youth-obsessed culture, we often think getting older means we lose capacities.

The words on the page get blurrier, conversation gets muddled and lost in the background din, we walk with a cane. But that’s at best half true, and it strikes me as rather ironic that it takes a literal bitter cup to remind me it’s possible for things to get better with age, too: for palates to expand, for thirsts to be quenched in unexpected ways, for a blessing to be found under the bitter notes.

In the deep mid-winter

I’d be remiss to tell you all this without leaving you with a recipe, should you find yourself curious – and well-seasoned – enough to try the stuff. Fill a mixing glass with a handful of ice. Pour over two ounces of Canadian rye, a half ounce of double-strength sugar syrup, and a half ounce of Fernet Branca. Stir until cold. Strain into a coupe, and take a strip of peel off an orange, expressing its oils onto the surface of the cocktail before dropping it in. This is called a “Toronto” and it’s the perfect post-prandial sipper. Let it warm you through and through in the very depths of mid-winter, whether you reckon that season according to the calendar, stage of life, or both.