Tuaca

Tuaca is an amber-hued Italian liqueur that sits somewhere between a rum, a vanilla cream, and a brandy, with a recipe that has been kept continuously in production since the 1860s. It is made from a base of Italian grape spirit and a measure of aged rum, then infused with vanilla — the dominant note — and a quiet undertone of orange peel, cocoa and oak, and bottled in the same short, square-shouldered bottle it has worn for generations. The brand claims a Renaissance-era origin linking it to Lorenzo de\u0027 Medici and a Tuscan friar, but the commercial liqueur is a nineteenth-century invention refined in the Versilia hills and bottled near Camaiore. Tuaca is sweet but not cloying, gently warming, and very approachable on its own as a digestivo, served chilled after a heavy meal of pasta, bollito misto or pecorino. In the United States, where it has long been marketed as a winter sipper, the customary serve is hot — a Tuaca toddy, mug-and-cinnamon-stick warm — and it also forms the base of a "Tuaca Stinger" or a vanilla-edged pousse-café. Italians mostly drink it neat and cold, in a small tumbler, alongside the espresso that closes a long lunch.