A Symphony of Seasons

Bubblegum, Baroque, and the Four Seasons: How I Learned that Vivaldi's Violins Pair Perfectly with Quince-Infused Bubblegum Martinis (And Other Revelations from Altamura Distilleries' "Le Quattro Stagioni" Event at  The Four Seasons Hotel Firenze during Florence Cocktail Week).

By GIOVANNA G. BONOMO

June 2025

There are few things in life more reliably thrilling than being invited to a cocktail event where the drinks are inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, served in a 15th-century Florentine chapel, and—this is the part that really gets the heart fluttering four seasons of cocktails-—the marketing gods demand symmetry.What I found was something far more extraordinary than what I could have imagined: a room full of artists, journalists, and entrepreneurs, and bartenders who had somehow convinced themselves that the best way to honour an 18th-century Venetian composer was to turn his music into liquid form and serve it in a glass.  And you know what? It worked.

Altamura Distilleries, co-founded by Americans Frank Grillo and Steve Acuna, the mad geniuses behind this venture, had taken their Puglian wheat vodka—already a minor miracle of agricultural stubbornness (Pane di Altamura grain, PDO-protected, because Italians don’t just grow food, they legislate its soul)—and fed it into what I can only describe as a concept. Each cocktail was a season, each season a symphony, each symphony a drink that, if you squinted, might just explain the meaning of life. Or at least make you reimagine it.

Primavera (Spring): Edoardo Sandri’s creation was like stumbling into a meadow after three espressos—Lucano Anniversario redistilled into something that tasted like herbaceous electricity, with sakura liqueur acting as a “floral API” (a phrase I never thought I’d hear outside of a tech conference). It was spring in a glass, assuming spring also contained a subtle but insistent whisper of Drink me faster.

Estate (Summer): Dario Sgroi’s offering was a geopolitical handshake in liquid form: Sicilian watermelon wine shaking hands with Oaxacan mezcal, with Altamura’s vodka playing the role of diplomatic moderator. (“Now, now, no terroir wars at the table.”) The result was creamy, smoky, and inexplicably refreshing—like summer vacation if summer vacation came with a tasting note.

Autunno (Autumn): Benedetta Di Pietro had taken tomatoes—already Italy’s most sacred fruit—and turned them into clear, fizzy umami. This was molecular gastronomy at its most mischievous, the kind of trick that makes you say, “Wait, this is tomato?” before immediately demanding another.

Inverno (Winter): Adam Redli’s winter cocktail was nostalgia in a coupe glass: quince, vanilla, and lime bubblegum, which sounds like the result of a dare but somehow worked. It was like being handed a snow globe that you could drink, if snow globes were also slightly psychedelic.

All of this unfolded beneath frescoed ceilings, with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played live by Interpreti Veneziani—because nothing says “cutting-edge cocktail science” like a 300-year-old violin concerto. The setting was so aggressively Florentine that I half-expected Michelangelo to wander in, take one look at the drinks menu, and mutter, “Mamma mia, these guys are overcomplicating the spritz.” But here’s the thing: it wasn’t overcomplicated. It was, in fact, a perfect marriage of tradition and absurdity, the kind of event that could only happen in Italy, where centuries of art, food, and melodrama collide with modern ingenuity. The “artisanal intelligence” wasn’t in some cold, calculating machine—it was in the hands of the people who knew when to let Puglian wheat speak for itself and when to turn it into something entirely new.

As I walked the private golden-lit garden of the palatial estate that evening, I realized the true genius of the evening wasn’t in the cocktails, or the music, or even the fact that no one had spilled vodka on a 15th-century fresco. It was that, in a world increasingly run by algorithms, the best ideas still come from humans—especially the ones who look at a deconsecrated chapel and think, You know what this place needs? A quince-infused bubblegum martini. And for that, Florence Cocktail Week and Altamura Distilleries, I salute you.