apéritif

Apéritif (English: aperitif, also apertif) derives from French apéritif, which comes from medieval Latin aperitivus — from Latin aperire, meaning 'to open.' The word is related to English 'aperture' (an opening), 'April' (possibly from Latin aperire, as the month that opens the year into spring), and the botanical term 'dehiscence' (the opening of a seed pod). In French culinary and social vocabulary, the apéritif is the drink served before dinner to open the appetite — stimulate gastric juices, signal the transition from the day to the meal, create a social moment before the table is sat.

The tradition of drinking something bitter or herbal before a meal to stimulate the appetite is ancient, rooted in the humoral medicine that dominated European medical thinking from antiquity through the seventeenth century. Bitter herbs were believed to promote the production of bile and gastric acid, preparing the stomach for the demands of dinner. The specific French word apéritif in its modern culinary sense, applied to a pre-dinner drink, emerges in the nineteenth century as French café and restaurant culture formalized the structure of the meal into distinct courses and occasions.

The nineteenth century was also the golden age of the aperitif as a commercial category. Vermouth — the aromatized fortified wine first commercialized in Turin in 1786 — was the foundational aperitif. Campari, founded in Milan in 1860, offered a more intensely bitter alternative. Dubonnet, created in Paris in 1846, and Lillet, developed in Bordeaux in 1872, filled different niches. Each of these drinks was marketed as a health product as well as a pleasure — the bitterness was medicine — which gave the apéritif category a moralizing justification that the pleasure alone might not have afforded in the nineteenth century. French café culture absorbed all of them and made the pre-dinner drink a social institution: the hour of the apéritif, typically six to eight in the evening, became as established as the meal itself.

The word reached English in the late nineteenth century through travel literature, restaurant menus, and the Anglophone fashion for French social forms. It was naturalized enough to appear in English dictionaries by the early twentieth century but retained enough foreignness to carry its French spelling and an air of Continental sophistication well into the late twentieth century. Today 'aperitif' and its abbreviated form 'aperitivo' (borrowed from Italian, where the tradition is equally strong) are common in English food and drink writing, and the pre-dinner drink occasion has been enthusiastically adopted and adapted far beyond France and Italy.