The Italian soda culture is for grown-ups

On chinotto, cedrata, spuma, and why the country that drinks the least soda makes the most of it

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

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Last week I wrote a story about amaro, the line-up of Italian bitter alcoholic drinks. Sometimes, I also mention wine here and there. But I am far from a wine, beer, or any kind of alcohol expert, for two reasons.

One, if I drink alcohol at all, I drink whisky, which means scotch, and almost exclusively scotch that comes from the island of Islay, from the Inner Hebrides. You know the ones that smell as if you set fire to a dead lamb’s carcass, let it burn with oakwood, put out the fire by shoveling damp dirt on it, shoveled the results into a barrel, distilled it with alcohol, and there you go, you have whisky. OK, maybe this was too much information, but you get it: if I drink at all, which is rare, it’s scotch, neat (obviously).

Two, I don’t drink. It’s a health choice, so nothing serious is behind it. I just don’t drink at all, for quite a while now. I don’t even miss it, which is kinda weird to me a little, but the world of non-alcoholic drinks is getting deeper and deeper. Of course, it’s easy for me, because there is no social pressure. I don’t go to office parties or work-related events (the last time I set foot in a traditional office was in 2014, maybe), no big circle of friends, no nightlife, and I am married (Sophia also rarely drinks).

But we do go out a lot. We also enjoy just sitting down in a bar or a café and watching people. A normal dinner in a restaurant is easy without alcohol: you order water, maybe a soda. But sitting down just for a drink, it’s pretty lame to have just water. The situation screams for a cocktail, a beer, or whatever you prefer.

Yes, there are these non-alcoholic versions of alcoholic drinks that we all know. But these are almost always similar to vegetarian and vegan versions of meat and dairy products. No one on this planet has ever said that “hmmmm this seitan-based burger patty is so much better than a smashburger.” Or “this dairy-free milk is sooooo much better than full-fat milk.” Likewise, no one has ever had the bravery to say that “OMG this zero alcohol beer is so much better than your IPA!” Almost all zero-alcohol imitations of alcoholic drinks are horrible. The best compliment you might manage is “hmmm, this is almost as good as the real one.” Which means it’s not a suffering to drink it. I can name a few 0% beers. I had a good 0% wine once. And there is one non-alcoholic Martini vermouth that earns its place. The rest are exactly like a vegan burger patty. Not meant for human consumption.

So what can you do then? You are a grown-up. You want to enjoy the view with a cold drink in your hand that is not alcoholic, not overpoweringly sweet like a cola or basically any American-style drink, and not among the usual suspects of tonic water or ginger beer (nothing wrong with them, I’m a sucker for a proper ginger beer or a good dry tonic).

Thankfully, the Italian line-up of sodas is here to save your day.

The national heritage of soda

If I say Waco, Texas, most people, but Americans for sure, would say two things. Dr Pepper would be one of them (the other is probably the siege). Atlanta? Of course, Coca-Cola. If I say Fanta, the ones who know the story will tell you it’s the Aryan cola, which pretty much covers the origin, since it comes from Nazi Germany due to Coca-Cola shortages during the war (but it was barely drinkable, thanks Germany, so an Italian had to intervene, and now the world drinks drinkable Fanta). If I say Kofola, the entire Czechia and Slovakia jump up from their seats. Staying around Slavs, Oranzada, hello, Poland? Or Irn-Bru? Scotland. Traubi or Márka? My turf, Hungary. Vimto? Manchester, England (although I wouldn’t be so proud of that lads, it’s almost undrinkably sweet). Inca Kola? Peru, and Coca-Cola had to buy into it, because the Incas dominated the market. Julmust? Oh my God, Sweden, why? Almdudler from Austria? It’s actually pretty good. The list is endless.

Anyway, you get it. Soda is as much a national heritage as wine regions are. Some brands survived the Coca-Cola and PepsiCo domination and market colonization because the locals had genuine feelings towards these brands. Others not just survived but still beat the giants at their own game, so the biggies had to buy them up, or still compete with them on the market.

But I think it was obvious from my list of national sodas: a country has one, maybe two or three heritage soda brands. I have not seen anything remotely close to what Italy has in this game. It’s pretty unreal. And if you look closely, it’s even wilder.

Don’t believe me? Remember the national list above? OK. This is Italy’s soft drink market (short version): Lurisia, Chinó, Sanbitter, Crodino, Lemonsoda, Oransoda, Tassoni, San Benedetto, Paoletti, Spumador, Chin8 Neri, Mole Cola, Polara, Tomarchio, Abbondio, Baladin, Gingerino, Plose, Galvanina, Brasilena, and this is where I give up, but I have twice as many names like these.

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A small detour on economics and consumerism

Who owns soda and who drinks soda? Economics and consumerism. I love economics because it is basic and mostly black and white, since it’s numbers.

Who owns the drink brands? It’s the same as with anyone else: mostly the giants, some local bigger brands, and a thin slice of no one (still independent). The top four groups in the Italian soft drink market, Coca-Cola, San Benedetto, Sanpellegrino, and Spumador, control 70% of it between them. Add the next four, and you’re at nearly 90%. Inside that, the cola segment alone is over 60% of everything carbonated Italians drink, and cola belongs to Coca-Cola almost entirely, with Pepsi as a rounding error. As for the heritage names: the Sanpellegrino line-up (Chinò, Sanbittèr, the aranciate) is Nestlé (Swiss, like Nespresso). The citrus sodas (Lemonsoda, Oransoda, the Crodo brands) are owned by Royal Unibrew, a Danish company. Spumador belongs to the Dutch (Refresco). Some others sit with big Italian companies like Campari (Crodino) and San Benedetto, and even Coca-Cola picked up a local artisanal brand, Lurisia.

But roughly 10% of the market is fully independently owned by small local Italian companies. And they give most of the brands in numbers. All of them small-produced, local, almost fully family-owned. On one hand, it is super unusual compared to the world’s economics, and on the other, it is 100% Italian and goes hand in hand with campanilismo, the hyper-local Italian way of life that gave us 100 different pasta shapes.

Consumerism is different, and it’s worth a word here, because it defines the place of soda and soft drinks in Italy. While volume is controlled by the giants, variety is owned by the locals. And the answer to the why is in the volume itself. Italy consumes around 2 billion liters of carbonated soft drinks a year. That’s around 50 liters per capita. The US? 40 billion liters, 130 per capita, from less than six times the population. Italy sits at the bottom of soda consumption in Western society.

And this is the paradox. Italy consumes the least amount of these drinks. Yet Italy has the highest variety of them. The unbelievably long line-up of fizzy drinks in Italy survives on the thinnest margin of people who actually consume these drinks.

Why? Short answer? Because soda is not for kids, silly!

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Soda is for grown-ups

This is where the circle completes. Italy consumes the smallest volume of soda but has the widest variety of choices to pick from, all locally produced by local companies.

Why? Because soda has a completely different use case for Italians. It’s part of the aperitivo culture. Soda is the non-alcoholic alternative for aperitivo. Sometimes it is even preferred as the only alternative for aperitivo.

It is rarely consumed by the liter. Go to any Italian grocery shop and look at the soda aisle. Soda is almost exclusively sold in small bottles, 20 to 40 centiliters. Only a few sell big (1-2 liters), usually the ones owned by the big brands. The local ones? They fit into your mini-fridge, and they look cool on a bar shelf.

What makes a soda for grown-ups? The same flavors as alcohol: bitter, savory, even spicy. Not overpoweringly sweet. Yes, they have sugar in them (plenty), but the taste note is almost never sweet. It’s either more bitter than most alcoholic amaros, or more citrusy than biting into a whole lemon. Or it’s spicy, a mixture of bitter and sharp the way a ginger drink is, or a tonic is.

Also, as with amaro, as with most aperitivo drinks, you can’t drink too many of them. No one drinks five Sanbitters or chinottos. You drink one, maybe two, with ice, over an hour or two at a bar, sitting, eating nuts or something with it.

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The campanilismo of fizz

In Italy, as a foreigner, it feels like locals sometimes deliberately can’t and won’t see beyond their immediate circles. Even a street can have its own “national” identity here that is fundamentally different from the others. Every town has its own pasta version, its own cookie, its own amaro, its own heroes, its own version of tomato sauce, and, of course, almost everyone has their own soda.

So, what can be local in a soda? The flavoring, the water, and the bottling factory. Yeah, it’s this simple.

Let’s start with flavoring. Almost all chinotto brands come from Savona. Why? Because that particular tree that produces this inedible orange grows on a 40km stretch of the Ligurian coast. Nowhere else does it grow in quantity like there. Cedrata? The weird-shaped Diamante cedro, a citron, not a lemon, grows on the Riviera dei Cedri in Cosenza, Calabria, and travels north to Saló on Lake Garda every October. It’s called the viaggio del cedro. There it gets bottled as cedrata. Aranciata rossa? Blood orange pigments properly only with the cold nights on the volcanic soil around Etna, Sicily. Even the premium blood-orange version of Fanta runs on Sicilian blood orange.

The water. There is an entire line-up built around Italian natural, thermal, and hot springs, where the soda brand’s main ingredient is the special water. Crodino bottles the water only from Crodo, because it’s a thermal spa natural spring. Same with Gingerino (Recoaro Terme), Lurisia (Roccaforte Mondovì), Plose (Bressanone): these drinks won’t bottle any other water than the natural spring they originally came from, period.

And there are the ones with nothing special in them, but the factory and the production location keep them local, and people would probably riot and rebel if these places got shut down. Mole Cola, from Turin, named after Turin’s icon, the Mole Antonelliana. Or the two spumante: the nera from Cermenate, Como, which the Northerners mix into red wine in their working men’s circoli, a native Lombard tradition with its own dialect name, sü e giò (we have a version of this in Hungary where some people mix cola into wine, which is horrible, so I shouldn’t judge), and the bionda from Ascoli, rarely seen north of Tuscany, the Marche, and Abruzzo. And lastly, Brasilena from Girifalco, Calabria, a coffee-flavored soda you can’t find even in Italy outside of Calabria, but ask anyone who’s originally from Calabria, I bet they have it fuckin’ shipped across continents for themselves (with the packs of nduja).

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The special case of Italian soda

Almost none of these drinks come as syrups. This is the core difference between Italian, or any small-batch local sodas, and the giants like Coca-Cola. Almost all soda brands started the same way. It's a similar story to amaro.

Most current brands were started by pharmacists as a digestive. Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, even Pepsi (started by pharmacist Caleb Bradham as "Brad's Drink" in New Bern, North Carolina), all come from pharmacists. As do most Italian soda brands, at least the old ones. But then came the separation of location and ingredient, with the introduction of the syrup. This is why and how giants like Coca-Cola could dominate the world. One syrup above all, adapted to whatever carbonated water you have at your factory. We bring the syrup, or not even that, just the recipe of the syrup, and you bring your fizzy water, ciao. It can be global. Try this with, for example, the aranciata rossa, with blood oranges that are local only to the slopes of Etna.

Can it be done with other blood oranges? Probably, but it wouldn’t look or taste the same. You would say OK, but coloring and chemistry, let’s fake it in a lab. I would say OK, good luck trying to sell it in Italy. I’m sure people in the US will happily drink whatever poison they can get that comes with a pound of sugar dissolved in a liter of fizzy water, but in Italy, if you look at the labels of these drinks, the ingredient lists are short. Almost none of them have anything added that is not natural.

The lack of syrup is one reason these drinks come in small bottles. The natural way to consume this is sitting at a bar with a 10cl bottle of Sanbitter, Campari-red, non-alcoholic, with ice and a slice of orange, a small bowl of chips, and talking to your table or watching the people. The American soda-drinking culture is totally different: it revolves around the magic word, refill. It’s unlimited, it’s refillable, it’s portable, it’s endless.

Also, I mentioned this above, but these drinks are sometimes not separated from their alcoholic cousins, especially wine. Spuma, which is the Italian version of a simple sugary carbonated soft drink with some caramel flavor (much like any cola, sort of), is closely connected to wine. Cheap wine topped with some sugary fizzy drink: practically the working man’s spritz.

And lastly, it’s so embedded in the local culture that you can’t tear it out. Chinotto itself is a nostalgic gesture of hipster culture nowadays, because the drink is older than the Italian Republic. And my favorite, which you can see almost anywhere in Sicily: the live soda experience. Kiosks selling the lemon, soda, and salt combo. Lemon squeezed into your plastic cup by hand, sea salt in, topped up with soda and ice, all in front of you, live. Ask for completo, and you get mandarin syrup with sugar as a “spice.” It’s alive because it’s live, part of the street culture.

I'm a big sucker for Dr Pepper. I also prefer Coca-Cola over Pepsi, and I drink Coke only from cans, close-to-frozen, ice-cold. But most days, when I am at the bar, just sitting and doing nothing, I prefer my Sanbitter or Chinotto.