A local bar scene on the spritz

Just a friendly warning for this summer: You will get spritzed. And you’ll like it.

With a host of new Italian-style aperitivo bitter liqueurs hitting the Bay Area market and a surging popularity among American drinkers, spritz cocktails are increasingly finding their way onto menus. Light, bubbly and refreshing — and low in alcohol — they make for perfect warm-weather drinking on the patio.

At the weekly Off the Grid Presidio Picnic, the drink is trending. “Last year we would make anywhere from 20-30 spritz per day,” says Jon Gasparini of Rye on the Road, who runs the bars at the Sunday event. “This season we have days where we serve well over a hundred.”

According to Andrew Adams, bar manager at Oakland’s Adesso, warmer weather brings a surge in sales for drinks that are refreshing and not too sweet — two central qualities of the spritz.

“It's not a drink that has ever been completely off the radar,” says Adams. “But it is most certainly enjoying its moment right now.”

Historically speaking, the spritz was once little more than wine with water, a practice that is said to have begun when the Austrian Hapsburg Empire controlled the Italian state of Veneto. Finding the local Italian wine too strong for their tastes, the Austrians would ask for a spritzen, or splash of water.

In their new book “Spritz” (Ten Speed Press), authors Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseau explain how the drink evolved into the one we know today. In the 1920s, white wine and soda spritzes started getting an additional (albeit tiny) dose of amaro. Decades later, the 1980s saw the utilization of the Charmat method, which allowed for the production of inexpensive sparkling Prosecco. And the final piece of the puzzle came when beach resorts near Venice began serving a large wine glass full of ice, Aperol and Prosecco (replacing the still wine), thus creating the Aperol Spritz. Beachgoers could drink a few without going sideways too fast, and look good holding the drink.

The visual appeal is unquestionably part of its popularity, says Nicky Beyries, bar manager at Laszlo and Foreign Cinema. Its bright colors are enticing and, especially when garnished well, a spritz can offer an antidote to heavier cocktails. “I think that people are tired of cocktails that are brown on brown — aperitivos are so bright and colorful they can be hard to resist,” says Beyries.

The demand is certainly being led by a big marketing campaign by Aperol, the Italian liquor still most commonly associated with spritz cocktails, but a rising tide lifts all boats, especially when the recipe lends itself so well to customization.

At Aatxe, the spritz gets translated into Spanish with the use of Cava and a sloe berry Basque liqueur called Pacharan. Tosca Cafe breaks the rules of tradition (and purists may say decency) with the wild-out fun of the GP Spritz, where Miller High Life beer replaces the sparkling components.

But even sticking to the standard template — a combination of bitter liqueur and sparkling wine — can yield great variations.

At Ca’Momi in Napa, Laura Sanfilippo and Tara Heffernon designed four variations of the spritz that range from light (Ca’Momi Spritz with sparkling rosé wine, lemon soda and Cappelletti) to dark and earthy (Fuga, with sweet vermouth and Vecchio del Capo Amaro) by tweaking the components like the style of amaro, or by adding citrus-focused liqueurs, shrubs, sodas or syrups.

“For us, a spritz must have a base of some kind of bitter/sweet aperitif, vermouth or amari. We like to layer multiple ones,” Sanfilippo says.

Gasparini sees the mainstream palate evolving quickly at Presidio Picnic, where the crowd is a huge sample of the Bay Area population, not the typical bar patrons he sees at his downtown cocktail destination, Rye. “In serving people that have no concept of aperitivo culture and never tried a spritz — this is where we see the collective palate changing and being much more open to bitter, complex flavors than before,” Gasparini says.

That mass shift toward bitter flavors, from salad greens to hoppy beer, is creating a new market for more spritz-style aperitivo liqueurs. Along with more imports from Italy, there are new versions being made in this country. Among the newcomers are Grand Poppy from Greenbar Distillery in Los Angeles (which uses poppies as a bittering agent) and the newly released Bruto Americano from St. George Spirits in Alameda.

“The real important point of differentiation is philosophical,” says St. George Spirits master distiller Lance Winters. “I felt like with so many different aperitivi, the bitterness was important and some bright note in the nose, but the middle part of the nose and palate was missing. So being able to take that empty space and find a way for us to dance in it, that was the important thing.”

Bruto Americano gets an assortment of botanicals that flavor the spirit using hot and cold steeping like a bark called cascara segrada that comes from the California buckthorn tree and contributes a woodsy cinnamon and sandalwood essence. Seville orange, balsam fir, gentian and rosemary are added as well, and the whole thing gets colored a potent red color with cochineal, an insect that adds no flavor. The taste of the Bruto Americano is decisively woodsy and piney, light and dry with bitterness that lingers in a pleasant way.

Those bitter flavors may be an acquired taste, but the spritz is here to stay. And how it finds a place in Bay Area culture could be the best part.

In Italy, the spritz is a key part of the aperitivo hour: a tradition that is less like happy hour and more like a pre-meal gathering to unwind with friends. Ca’Momi co-owner Valentina Guolo-Migotto, who is from the Veneto region, describes aperitivo hour as the window of time between arriving home from work and then sitting down to dinner. It’s a ritual that Guolo-Migotto wishes more Americans would embrace to reconnect with each other.

“I would like to see the time in between work and dinner become a time when people put down their phones and other technology and make time for one another,” she says.

So when it comes to this storied cocktail and all of its charms, perhaps the most important lesson is to learn to slow down and connect with people face to face — and spritz to spritz.

Lou Bustamante is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: thevillagedrunk