“[C]ochineal was the fundamental base of the color red … as tough and durable as the stained glass that one sees in the churches, it can preserve its color for entire centuries, without changing.”  Amy Butler Greenfield, paraphrasing Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725), in A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire.

When sipping spirits to soothe or to celebrate, many drinkers prefer bitter flavors.  Such drinkers savor amari, the potent Italian liqueurs taken at the end of a meal to aid digestion and reflection. For a century and a half, the lustrous red Campari has been the most famous amaro.
Traditionally, Campari took its signature red from the backs of a peculiar all-female labor force, the South American cochineal insect. The cochineal and the carmine dye it produces have nurtured colonial empires, industrial manufacturing, and cocktail culture for centuries.  Most recently, the noble insect has fallen victim to a familiar fate: Campari’s cochineals are out of a job.

Of course, the bugs are doing their best to stay busy. In Peru, millions of them awaken to the prospect of a long, hard day nesting on the fronds of the prickly pear, or nopal cactus. Their habitat bore them the name nochezli, or “blood of the nopal” in ancient Aztec. Later, Spanish invaders dubbed them cochinilla (possibly from the Latin coccus, for “scarlet dye,” but literally “little pig,” and the name given to a similar-looking woodlouse).

Campari’s erstwhile employee, the female cochineal, is basically housebound.  She has no wings, and spends her day sucking nourishment from the host cactus.  If challenged, she excretes the brilliant blood-red carminic acid to defend herself.  On the other hand, the male cochineal has wings, which both alleviate the need for acid-shooting and create a sexual double standard. Each male flits from frond to frond, attending to a harem of 300 females.  Pregnant, the females’ backs fill with eggs, causing them to swell.

In better times, a farmer (an Aztec, a conquistador, or a contractor for Gruppo Campari) would remove the egg-swollen, acid-rich females to be killed, dried, and crushed. Processing the powdered insect bodies (by boiling them in ammonia or sodium carbonate solution, then filtering and adding alum) results in the purified coloring known simply as “carmine.”

Carmine and cochineal added color to the world for centuries before a bartender poured the first Negroni. Aztec doctors mixed ground cochineal with vinegar, as a poultice for wounds. Aztec cuisine featured cochineal tamales. Aztec prostitutes lured potential customers by smearing their breasts and teeth with it.  Colonial Spain reaped massive profits for centuries by selling cochineal for use in dye-making, cosmetics, and medicines. Louis XIV covered the walls and armchairs of Versailles with cochineal-dyed tapestries, and hung cochineal-colored curtains around 435 palace beds.

Nineteenth-century English physicians prescribed one of the first cochineal-dyed cocktails: mix cochineal, cream of tartar, and Venetian soap. Shake or stir.  Sip three times a day to relieve jaundice.

Using “St. John’s Blood,” a dye made from the kermetic acid produced by “Polish cochineal” (a similar insect), Russian and Polish apothecaries colored folk medicines and homebrewed vodkas.  Because carmine is more potent, more permanent, and more brilliantly colored than “St. John’s Blood,” it eclipsed kermes as the go-to dye for nearly every imaginable European foodstuff.

It was only natural that Gaspare Campari would choose carmine as the primary coloring in the amari he concocted from herbs, spices, barks, and fruit peels in Novara, Italy, in 1860. The distinctive carmine hue gave Mr. Campari’s bitters an appealing look and created an immediate association in the drinker with fine tapestries, European palaces, and royal clothing. Like the Spanish traders stumbling into nopalry centuries before, Campari became wildly successful.

Presumably, the cochineals back in Peru enjoyed full employment during these boom times, comprising the first 147 years of Campari’s existence. Campari drinkers in 1915 or 1995 received the same medicinal benefits from carmine that accrued to the jaundiced Britons and the Aztec tamale-eaters of antiquity.

But in 2005, the phrase “contains carmine” abruptly disappeared from Campari’s English label, replaced by “artificially colored.” All Campari in North America was carmine-free by 2006. Peru’s cochineals hit the insect unemployment line en masse.

The reasons for Campari’s sudden reduction in bug-labor have spurred copious debate. Some suggest that Gruppo Campari feared pressure from vegans and vegetarians, who avoid insect-colored products. Others cited rare, but severe, allergic reactions to cochineal.

Perhaps most fittingly, some speculate that in a world of cheap chemical additives, it finally became too costly for Campari to import the natural dye prized by the court of Louis XIV.

Dave Karraker, director of public relations for Skyy Spirits (Campari’s American importer) laid the blame for the formula change at the tiny feet of his former employees. Insinuating that cochineal bugs cannot be trusted to produce consistent results, Mr. Karraker wrote that Campari began using artificial color due “to uncertainty in supply of carmine.”

Campari devotees and other cocktail aficionados are less concerned about the plight of flightless insect workers.  For them, only one question matters: does “new” Campari taste any different from “old” (pre-2006) Campari? Scott Baird, manager of San Francisco’s 15 Romolo, says that new Campari tastes different. “No one, in my early bartending career, would have told you that Campari imparted any sweetness,” he says.  But now they do.  Accordingly, Mr. Baird speculates that in 2006, Campari upped the sugar content to balance out the bitterness. But he also acknowledges that his customers’ perception of sweetness changes as they become more cocktail savvy, and that, as a Campari fan himself, it’s easy to fall victim to “romantic and colored opinion about the product.”  (I did not ask Mr. Baird whether he intended the pun.)

Erik Adkins managed the bar at San Francisco’s Slanted Door in 2007 (he now runs the cocktail program at Heaven’s Dog). When his inventory briefly contained both old and new Campari, his staff tasted them side-by-side. Said Mr. Adkins: “We all uniformly agreed [the new stuff] had a different flavor profile.” Where the 2005 Campari was dryer, Mr. Adkins says the 2007 formulation seemed rounder, simpler, and less complex.

Meanwhile, as concerns about artificial colorants and other chemical additives proliferate, there are reports of a “cochineal renaissance” among food producers.  And in an interesting twist, Mr. Karraker reports that Campari producers “in Brazil, some South American markets and a few other small markets still use carmine because of differing local legal standards regarding coloring extracts.”

It is not hard to imagine enterprising mixologists returning from Brazilian vacations with a bottle of carmine-colored Campari for side-by-side comparison with its artificially colored successor. “Brazilian Campari” could be the new “Mexican Coke.”

On the other hand, there is something to be said for preserving the mystery.  A little uncertainty with one’s Negroni seems appropriate, given the cochineal insect’s historical ability to spark debate. For centuries, people have engaged in spirited cocktail conversation over everything from the medical effects of carmine dye to the ethics of consuming crushed insect shells. Now we can add at least two topics to that list: the flavor profile of bug juice, and the economic impact of several million unemployed, promiscuous South American insects.