For about a decade, ordering an Aperol was embarrassing and ordering Amaro made you look like you knew your way around a well stocked drinks cabinet. Negronis led to Campari neat, then to obscure Sardinian digestifs that tasted like cough medicine and cost £14 a shot. The amaro moment was real, then it peaked, and now the bartenders who were evangelising Fernet are quietly reaching for something else.
That something else is French. Specifically, the herbal liqueurs France has been producing for centuries and largely keeping to itself: Chartreuse, yes, but also the stuff beyond Chartreuse. Génépi, the alpine herb liqueur made from artemisia plants in the Savoie and Dauphiné regions, has been appearing on menus in well-healed bars and restaurants with increasing regularity. So has Suze, the gentian-root bitter that is pale gold, bracingly dry and has been drunk by French grandmothers since 1889. Bénédictine, distilled in Fécamp in Normandy from a secret blend of 27 herbs and spices, is turning up in cocktails at the kind of bars that used to be Aperol-only territory. (Its monastic origin story, all sixteenth-century monks and lost recipes, is a nineteenth-century marketing invention. The drink itself dates to 1863.)
What is driving this? Partly bartender boredom and après-ski nostalgia. Partly a French hospitality resurgence: Paris has had a serious bar scene for a few years now, and what serious Paris bars stock tends to filter outward. And partly the fact that these liqueurs are interesting in a different way to amari. Where Italian bitters tend to hit you with a wall of herb and sugar, French herbal liqueurs are often drier, more medicinal, more alpine. They sit differently in the stomach after a meal.
Génépi is the one to seek out if you haven’t already. Bottles like Génépi des Pères Chartreux, are made by the same Carthusian monks who make Chartreuse but not to be confused with the famous green liqueur: this is a separate génépi, drier and more serious, distilled from Alpine wormwood at 40%. Master of Malt stocks it in the UK. Dolin makes a more widely available version (a 50cl bottle runs around £30 to £40), and it tastes like drinking a cold mountain meadow, which sounds revolting and is actually excellent. Suze costs less, comes in a full 70cl bottle, and mixes brilliantly with tonic or sparkling water if you want something lighter before dinner. Chartreuse remains the headline act, though “headline” now comes with a catch: the monks capped production in 2021, so green Chartreuse is hard to find and runs £65 to £90 for 70cl in the UK when you do. It is easier to buy in France, and it has the rare advantage of continuing to age and improve in the bottle.
I had my first taste of génépi in its natural habitat after a morning hike in the alps last summer. It was at a chalet restaurant next to a lake slightly up the hill towards Avoriaz a short drive from Morzine. After we’d eaten a huge blue bottle arrived buried in a block of ice with alpine flowers frozen into it, poured into small stemmed glasses. The patron told me a long story, most of which my French couldn’t hold, about the harvest and how what you put in determines what you get back. It was génépi, or near enough. It might have been a house maceration of whatever grows on that hillside. In the Alps this stuff isn’t a trend arriving on menus, it’s homemade, foraged, kept in the freezer, and in some villages still distilled from whatever people bring to the still. London bars are now charging £14 for a more refined version of something a Haute-Savoie grandmother has been making for free.
The practical upside of this shift is that French herbal liqueurs are cheaper to collect than aged amari and easier to find across Europe. Any decent French supermarket will have Suze and Bénédictine on the shelf, often for a few euros less than you’d pay here. Specialist UK importers including The Whisky Exchange and Master of Malt stock the broader range. If you’re in Paris, the Nicolas chain usually has a reasonable selection.
Order one after dinner instead of a dessert wine. Your stomach will thank you, and you’ll be ahead of the trend!
