Campari was founded in 1860. Casoni had already been at it for 46 years. One of Italy's oldest distilleries, the Casoni brothers set up in Finale Emilia in 1814 — just outside Modena, in the heart of Emilia-Romagna — and have been quietly making exceptional liqueurs ever since, racking up awards across successive generations while most of the world wasn't paying attention.

The Heritage is the one that started it all. The story goes that it was a foggy morning when the Casoni brothers first created their amaro recipe — and 200 years later, the family found it again in an old collection of recipes. That amaro now lives again.

The process is meticulous: herbs are cold-extracted, minced and left to macerate in a hydro-alcoholic solution for around 30 days, then transferred to tanks for another 30 days' rest. After filtering, the amaro rests a further 30 days in bottle to let everything knit together. That's three months from start to finish before it sees a shelf.

The result draws on more than 20 botanicals — sweet and bitter orange, hypericum, cardamom, and absinthe among them. On the nose: amber-coloured with medicinal herb aromatics. On the palate, a warmer, sharper style — orange-rind bitterness and baking spice, with an intense bitter persistence balanced against dry fruit and citrus. Approachable enough to convert amaro sceptics, complex enough to satisfy the obsessives.

Superb after dinner neat or over a single large ice cube. Also excellent in a Paper Plane or a Negroni if you want to show off.

Two hundred years of know-how in a very reasonably priced bottle.