In the spring of 2010, an essay titled “Negroni Season” was published on the literary and culture website The Awl. Penned under the pseudonym Evelyn Everlady to shield its author from the wrath of an intensely private and vaguely vindictive former partner, the piece was a deeply personal exploration of an alcoholic boyfriend during a relationship that had taken place five years earlier, in 2005. At the time the essay was conceived, it was part of an ongoing series for the nascent website titled “The Worst Boyfriend in the World.” The concept originated as an inside joke between the author and a close friend who had witnessed years of the relationship firsthand and had recently become a cofounder of The Awl. Operating under a pseudonym was a necessary precaution, driven by the author’s desire to avoid confrontation, alongside a lingering, self-aware suspicion that neither she nor her subject would emerge from the narrative looking particularly commendable.
Looking back, the events of the essay were anchored in a specific era of young adulthood. In 2005, the author was not yet thirty years old, yet she distinctly remembered harboring an overwhelming sense of being fully and definitively grown-up. Living with a romantic partner carried a profound weight of domestic maturity, marked by all the traditional markers of adult life: hosting dinner parties, frequenting local farmers’ markets, enduring family visits, decorating a Christmas tree, and even jointly investing in a sturdy, midcentury Danish dining-room table. In that domestic bubble, it felt as though they had achieved the pinnacle of adult stability. Yet, amidst these domestic routines, the backdrop of the cocktail landscape looked entirely different from today.
Despite how ubiquitous the drink has become, society was living in a completely different drinking era two decades ago. As the author notes, anyone claiming otherwise is simply misremembering the cultural landscape of 2005. At the time, cocktail culture was still struggling to emerge from the lingering chokehold of the Sex and the City cosmo reign, while simultaneously bracing itself for the alarming, neon-hued rise of appletinis. The Negroni—a characteristically bitter concoction famously invented by an Italian aristocrat at a bar in Florence in 1919—was scarcely on the radar of the average American drinker.
By the time “Negroni Season” finally appeared online in 2010, the drink had achieved a tiny fraction of familiarity among dedicated imbibers. However, neither the author, her friends, nor various Italian liqueur manufacturers could have possibly anticipated the cultural shockwave that followed the essay’s publication. It quickly became the most widely shared, cited, and disseminated piece of writing the author had ever produced. Suddenly, an army of complete strangers was ready to weigh in on the author’s past romantic choices. Even more astonishingly, a massive wave of readers wrote in to share that they had lived through strikingly similar experiences with their own troubled partners.
Whether this unexpected resonance stemmed from a universal echo of the unsettling liminal space famously described by Britney Spears as being “not a girl, not yet a woman,” or simply because people universally identified with the exquisite, stinging pain of first love lost, the essay struck a deep chord. Whatever the underlying cause—and the author firmly maintains it had nothing to do with the actual cocktail itself—the cultural footprint of the piece began to expand rapidly.
Within a single year of publication, the author found herself unable to escape the cultural gravity of Negronis, experiencing a dizzying mix of bewilderment and personal offense. The phrase “Negroni Season” was quickly appropriated and co-opted into the lexicon of hospitality branding. Because the phrase was entirely fabricated by the essayist, no official consensus ever existed regarding when this supposed season actually takes place. Meanwhile, the demographic of bearded intellectuals favored by the author in their social circles seemed to universally abandon old-fashioneds in favor of the newly trendy bitter red drink.
Today, the Negroni has cemented its status as a permanent fixture on cocktail menus, alongside other standard bar offerings. Even worse, the rampant commercialization of the drink has spawned countless variations that push the boundaries of traditional mixology. A casual glance at contemporary New York City cocktail menus reveals an array of adventurous and occasionally horrifying adaptations, ranging from fruitcake-infused iterations to coconut-flavored variants.
At the same time, high-end establishments have embraced the trend with sophisticated execution. At Dante in Greenwich Village, patrons can purchase pre-batched Negroni Sessions featuring four distinct variations on the original theme. Other popular iterations include the Sbagliato—an accidental creation from 1972 that received a massive modern viral boost thanks to a 2012 video featuring actor Emma D’Arcy—as well as autumn-inspired recipes incorporating Fernet-Branca and Cynar. Creative bartenders now experiment freely by substituting the foundational gin with bourbon, rum, or mezcal. For purists questioning whether these altered drinks still qualify as true Negronis, the prevailing attitude has largely become a shrug of indifference. The cultural adoption has even extended across generations, with the author noting that her own mother recently ordered a nonalcoholic Phony Negroni during a casual lunch.
Reflecting on the origins of the piece, the author is frequently asked why she chose to write the essay in the first place. Was it born out of being too financially strapped for therapy at the time? Did Nora Ephron’s semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn plant the seed that there is genuine power in reclaiming the narrative reins of one’s own personal sorrow? Today, the exact motivations have grown blurry. Certainly, there was a quiet, petty satisfaction in knowing how much the former boyfriend would despise its existence. Yet, in the grand scheme, those initial motives matter little. History has firmly decreed that the cocktail will outlive the emotional anguish that initially inspired the penning of the essay.
As for the central figure of the essay, the former boyfriend has long since moved on, becoming someone else’s husband while reportedly doing well in life. The two maintain a cordial, modern distance, exchanging birthday wishes and occasionally tapping the heart icon on each other’s Instagram stories. Meanwhile, the author has found a new path, sharing her life with a tall, deeply kind partner who actively ensures she steers clear of anything that brings physical illness or emotional sorrow. Remarking on her personal relationship with the drink that inadvertently defined an era of her writing, the author notes that she has not consumed a single Negroni in the past twenty-one years. Looking back, mixed emotions remain—occasional regret for having written the essay at all, and fleeting wishes that she had dared to attach her real name to it from the start. Ultimately, however, her most persistent feeling is a lingering sense of missed opportunity that she never quite figured out a clever way to monetize the phenomenon of Negroni Season.
