Somehow, I spent years writing in Seattle without writing about Averna (except in the wider context of amaro), which was making a play to displace Fernet as city’s industry shot of choice. I expect that push was derailed not by preference, but by availability. This country is suffering a massive shortage of the amaro, and I want to know why.
Now, I’m not in the industry. Maybe the shortage is just for consumers, and bars are still able to stock at-will. But I haven’t been in a liquor store in months and seen even a single bottle. I can’t find anywhere online where I might be able to acquire it. The BevMo I used to go to in Ballard? Nope. The TotalWine I go to now in Phoenix? Also no, but maybe in June?. Drizzly? Maybe from some very small c-stores for some reason? I’ve seen enough to believe my own plight is not an outlier; it’s damn hard to get your hands on Averna right now. Why?
Averna is probably the most popular digestif that you can usually find on liquor store shelves, though Fernet may outpace it. I’d love to have access to sales data for spirits, but alas… It doesn’t seem that this is a case where demand spiked and caused a shortage, so it’s popularity is moot. It’s simply not coming to the US.
The rest of Gruppo Campari’s products seem to be arriving just fine; I’ve had no issues finding other imports from them like Campari, Aperol, and Grand Marnier. They’ve had Averna for nearly a decade, so it’s unlikely that the current issue is related to the acquisition or consolidation. I’ve even seen other brands that came over with Averna like Braulio on shelves, but not the flagship!
There’s no major publication traffic on the shortage, which is unsurprising. But I’m surprised by how little chatter I can find overall; this Reddit thread showed promise when a user was going on-location in Sicily, but they never followed-up. Some folks on Twitter are equally confused, but no one seems to have an answer. Lots of searches bring up a shortage of almost all of Campari’s products in 2015, which I do not remember at all.
I don’t have an answer either, and I don’t have a theory. My next deep-dive was to see if Sicilian exports are having issues in other industries, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Sicilian wine seems to be readily available at any big wine shop, and I can’t find any publications talking about issues with other big Sicilian exports like citrus. There may be a local shortage of some of the secret ingredients, but while I’d love to fly to the island and test that theory myself, that’s not quite in the cards.
If you, like me, are missing Averna in your digestif diet, I recommend you check out Vincenzi. It’s a very, very different profile but for some reason it’s filled the void for us as an after-dinner sipper and it seems to be readily available everywhere Averna isn’t. It’s a very orange profile and much sweeter than Averna, but it still has strong bitter notes and drinks great on the rocks. And if that’s not your jam, just grab whatever looks interesting in the amaro aisle; discovering the weird regional variations of the category is most of the fun anyways.
Have a theory on the shortage?