Southside Sips: Le Ack Spritzer

The wonderful thing about the spritzer category: the riffs are endless.

The key here is in that little -er addition to the end of the word “spritz,” the latter of which is a basic combination of bitter and flavorful, fruit-forward bubbly. But a spritzer? Ahhh, that’s just a little bit different. Yes, there are bubbles involved, but not the Prosecco kind. A spritzer combines wine and some kind of soda water, and then the riffs can ramble from there. It’s a refreshing combo but sometimes a little… boring. It begs for herbaceousness! What is herbaceous? Gin.

With juniper as the must-be-in-there-by-law ingredient, the rest of its make-up has a lot of wiggle room. The base spirit itself can be distilled from just about anything — grain, corn, grapes, beets — as long as the final liquid is neutral-ish in nature. As far as style goes, it can run from classic London Dry botanicals (coriander, orris root and angelica root, citrus peel, cinnamon bark, cardamom among them) to newer, modern styles of gin that draw upon their regional origins for a distinctive fingerprint and sense of spirited place.

Harmony Gin falls into the latter category. Part of the line-up from the company founded by Amy Holmwood, a financial and insurance wiz who started using her bag of financial tools to explore businesses in the wellness sphere (a personal plight that became an opening into investment opportunities — Holmwood suffered with both asthma growing up and Lyme disease as an adult), and actor and environmental activist Woody Harrelson, Harmony’s base is non-GMO, organically farmed Canadian corn and its botanicals are a walk on the wild side. Rose, artichoke leaf, elderberry, muscadine grapes, lime peel, hyssop, green tea leaves give it a unique, floral-forward stamp, but with grounding notes of traditional gin components: juniper, of course, plus coriander, lemon peel and angelica among them.

So of course, a spritzer made with Harmony is going to be a turn toward the exotic, with lots of layers of flavor from its pretty, flower-power, aromatic ingredients. In these last warm, sunny days of the season, it’s a lovely concoction to sip on while the sun goes down (appropriately, the same color as Harmony itself, which you can nab at local purveyors like Amagansett Wine & Spirits, Wainscott Main Wines & Spirits, Churchill Wines & Spirits and Sag Harbor Liquor).

Cheers, friends.