Local Connection: Nectar's Take on the White Negroni You Have Never Had

The Local Connection is a white negroni. That is the most accurate short description of it.

It is also not quite like any white negroni you have tried before, because two of its four ingredients are unusual enough to deserve a proper explanation, and because the technique used to finish it changes the experience of drinking it in a way that the description on the menu does not fully prepare you for.

Start with what you know, or what you think you know, and work outward from there.

The negroni: one hundred years of equal parts

The negroni was created in 1919 at Caffè Casoni in Florence, when Count Camillo Negroni asked his bartender to strengthen his Americano by replacing soda water with gin. The result was three ingredients in equal parts: gin, sweet vermouth, Campari. A spirit, a sweetness, a bitterness. They argue with each other slightly and then settle into something more interesting than any of them produces alone.

The negroni's genius is its structure. Nothing dominates. Remove any one component and the whole thing collapses. Add something that does not belong and it becomes something else entirely. The equal parts principle is not a constraint. It is the point.

For over a century, that three-ingredient structure has been riffed on, adapted, and rebuilt in almost every direction. The Boulevardier swaps gin for bourbon. The Mezcalita swaps Campari for mezcal. The Negroni Sbagliato replaces gin with prosecco. Each variation keeps the three-way balance intact while moving the flavour profile in a completely different direction.

The white negroni is the riff that most fundamentally changes the character of the original while remaining truest to its spirit.

What a white negroni does differently

The white negroni was invented in 2001 by British bartender Wayne Collins at Vinexpo in Bordeaux. He wanted to make a negroni but could not find Campari or sweet vermouth in the French wine region where he was staying. He went to a local shop and reached for French ingredients instead: Lillet Blanc, a French fortified wine, in place of sweet vermouth, and Suze, a French gentian liqueur, in place of Campari.

The result was structurally identical to the original but completely different in character. The heavy, red-fruit bitterness of Campari became the lighter, more herbal, pine-tinged bitterness of Suze. The warm, spiced richness of Italian sweet vermouth became the clean, slightly floral sweetness of Lillet Blanc. The drink moved from deep and brooding to something lighter, more botanical, more delicate. The same architecture in a completely different material.

The white negroni was barely known outside professional bar circles until Suze was first imported to the United States in 2012. Since then it has become one of the most widely respected variations in serious cocktail culture globally. And yet most people who have never worked behind a bar have still never tried one. The gap between the drink's reputation among bartenders and its visibility to the general public is significant, which is part of why it interested us.

The Local Connection is our version of it. We kept the three-way balance of the classic format, added a fourth ingredient that makes the drink distinctly Nectar, and then applied a technique to the whole thing that changes its texture and finish in a way that no standard negroni variation achieves.

The two substitutions that define the Local Connection

Where a classic white negroni replaces Campari with Suze and sweet vermouth with Lillet Blanc, the Local Connection makes two different substitutions in those same positions.

In the bitter position, we use the Leith Bitter Bianco from Old Poison Distillery. Old Poison is a craft distillery founded in 2017 by Fabrizio Cioffi at the Old Biscuit Factory in Leith, operating from a 30-litre copper pot still and producing spirits with an Italian sensibility applied to Edinburgh ingredients. Fabrizio also runs Bittersweet, the Italian aperitivo bar on Henderson Street in Leith that we have been drinking at regularly since we opened, and which hosted the Bumbu Originals Scotland Finals competition I entered earlier this year.

I was sitting alone at the Bittersweet bar on one of my first solo visits when I tried the Leith Bitter Bianco for the first time. I brought a bottle back to Panos. The Local Connection came out of that conversation.

The Bianco is lighter and more botanical than the red bitter aperitivo expressions most people associate with the negroni category. It carries 18 botanicals including burdock, cherry bark, and organically grown Neapolitan citrus, producing a bittersweet character that is genuinely its own thing rather than a pale imitation of the reds. In the context of a white negroni it replaces Suze without simply replicating it, bringing an Edinburgh-made, Italian-influenced bitterness to the drink that suits the identity of the whole cocktail.

In the vermouth position, we use Noilly Prat dry vermouth rather than Lillet Blanc. Noilly Prat is the same dry vermouth used in our Tzatziki Martini, aged outdoors in the Mediterranean sun at the distillery in Marseillan, which gives it a slightly oxidised, nutty complexity that fresher vermouths do not have. Where Lillet Blanc is sweet and approachable, Noilly Prat is dry and precise, which moves the Local Connection toward the drier, more spirit-forward end of the white negroni spectrum. It is a cocktail that rewards people who like their drinks with structure rather than sweetness.

The fourth ingredient

Three ingredients make a white negroni. Four make the Local Connection.

Mastiha is the addition, and it is the ingredient most people at Nectar have encountered without knowing what it is. It appears in the Drops of the River. We pour small cold glasses of it at the end of meals for guests we want to look after in a particular way. It is what we might describe as our house liqueur: the ingredient that runs through the menu and through the hospitality at Nectar in a way that nothing else does.

Mastiha is made from the resin of the mastic tree, which grows across the Mediterranean but only produces its precious resin in meaningful quantities on the southern tip of the Greek island of Chios. Something in the limestone soil and local microclimate of that specific stretch of coast creates conditions that have never been successfully replicated anywhere else. The resin is harvested by scoring the bark of the tree with a sharp tool, which causes the resin to emerge as tear-like droplets that crystallise as they dry. This is why the mastic tree is sometimes called the crying tree. The dried crystals have been collected by hand in the villages of southern Chios for over three thousand years. Herodotus wrote about mastic in the fifth century BC. Today it holds Protected Designation of Origin status from the European Union and recognition from UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

As a liqueur, mastiha is difficult to compare directly to anything else. Pine is the most immediate note, resinous and slightly sweet rather than hard. Cedar sits beneath it. A whisper of anise. A very gentle warmth and a finish that is long, clean, and slightly herbal in the best possible sense. In a cocktail it adds an aromatic dimension that no other ingredient provides. It does not compete with the other components. It connects them, sitting across the Bombay Sapphire, the Old Poison Bianco, and the Noilly Prat in a way that makes all three taste more coherent together than they would without it.

In the Local Connection, mastiha is the fourth voice in the conversation. The drink is not a three-ingredient white negroni with mastiha added on top. It is a four-ingredient cocktail that is in balance the same way the original negroni is in balance, with each component making the others more interesting than they would be alone.

Densing and the technique that changed the finish

The final step is where the Local Connection moves furthest from any white negroni that has come before it.

Once the four ingredients are assembled, the whole cocktail is densed with Mediterranean olive oil. Densing is the technique developed by Iain McPherson at Panda and Sons on Queen Street, which we wrote about in detail earlier this year. The process uses a vacuum blender to create a stable emulsion between a fat and a liquid at elevated temperature, producing an integration that does not separate over time. McPherson released the technique open-source, and we were among the first bars to begin experimenting with it seriously.

Panda and Sons is one of the best cocktail bars in the world. We have enormous respect for what Iain and the team there have built and for the generosity with which they share their innovations with the wider bar community. The densing technique would not be on the Nectar menu without them.

The effect of densing the Local Connection with olive oil is the thing that separates this cocktail from any standard white negroni in a way that has to be experienced rather than described. The cocktail takes on a milky, opalescent appearance in the glass. Not cloudy in the way of an undissolved ingredient, but hazy in the way of something fully integrated. If you have tried our Tzatziki Martini, which looks completely clear but tastes of food, the Local Connection is the opposite: it looks milky but tastes entirely like a cocktail.

The olive oil does not contribute flavour in the way that a syrup or an infusion does. What it contributes is texture and finish. The mouthfeel becomes rounder and more substantial. The flavour of the drink extends significantly beyond what an undensed version of the same four ingredients produces, lingering in a way that makes the balance between the gin, the bitter, the vermouth, and the mastiha feel more complete. You finish the drink tasting the whole cocktail, not just the last sip of it.

The olive oil also makes the connection to the Mediterranean identity of the cocktail feel complete. Gin, a local Edinburgh bitter, a French dry vermouth, a Greek island resin liqueur, and olive oil from the same sea that connects all of them. The name Local Connection works on two levels: the local spirits of Edinburgh and the shared Mediterranean origin of the other ingredients. Both of those things are true of this cocktail simultaneously.

What it tastes like

The Local Connection is described on the menu as punchy, bittersweet, and short.

It is served in a small glass without ice, the way a classic negroni should be served at its most concentrated. It is not a long drink. It is a drink that rewards attention over a few minutes rather than refreshment over half an hour. The bitterness is present and genuine but not aggressive, the mastiha sits across everything with its resinous warmth, the gin holds the structure together, and the olive oil extends the finish in a way that makes you understand why McPherson considers densing one of the most significant developments in cocktail making in recent years.

It is the most distinctly Nectar cocktail on the new menu. Every ingredient in it either comes from Edinburgh, from the Mediterranean tradition that defines our kitchen and our bar, or from both simultaneously.

It is also, almost certainly, a white negroni unlike any you have tried before.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and order the Local Connection.

Opening hours Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed

Nectar Bar, 73 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ