The Drink is Called Mirto
The Drink is Called Mirto
The drink is called mirto. For some reason, perhaps to torture their marauding invaders, or to piss off their friends, ancient Sardinian bandits began to make a liqueur out of local myrtle berries and give it to people they loved and/or wanted to fuck.
I first tried it in 2007, when my new wife and I were on our real honeymoon in Sardinia. (The first honeymoon, eight months prior in Cabo, had just been a short, silly trip after the wedding so that we could feel as if we’d actually gotten married.) The mirto was given to us at a menu-less agriturismo—a rustic tourist farm, with an outdoor dining area—where the cook served baby pigs roasted on spits even though you could kind of smell excrement wafting over from their pen.
I was pissed at my new, lovely wife. I didn’t have a good reason. I was just looking to pick a fight. We’d been married for less than a year but had always been told we were the ideal couple. Friends would ask, “How do you do it? You seem to have the perfect marriage.” Well, I was going to fuck that up, because I was getting pretty lit off of this bitter-tasting junk, and, well, I could.
I’m not proud of this moment, but it happened. After a completely delicious dinner, I drank a whole jug of mirto and started up. Why couldn’t we have stopped at the pecorino truck on the side of the road? (Yes, there’d been a pecorino truck on the side of the road.) Who’d care at this shitty farm without a dining room if we were five minutes late for dinner? I was getting my Sardinian on. I’d read a lot about how mercurial and balls-out wicked some of the locals could be over the many centuries they’d defended their island. I didn’t carry a knife in my boot, but I knew how to be obstinate, rude. This was important, because I needed my wife to see that we weren’t the perfect couple. Not that she didn’t know that (she’s brilliant). But I’d not quite been this much of a dick since callously dumping a nice cellist in college, and Sardinia and its myrtle-berry gasoline were going to show my wife that life with me wasn’t only going to be respectful discourse and caring embraces.
So I got ornery, drank more mirto, and my wife learned that I could be an asshole with a bad memory. (Thankfully, she found this quality endearing.) Because, as it had happened, I’d already been a jerk to her when we were dating. So in fact, on this night, I had only managed to show her that I can also be a moron. Which, I think, is something you have to do for your new spouse, so you can continue to be your congenial self, and she can know the dark stupidity within.