Fri 4 May 2007
When I was researching a piece about Fernet-Branca for the website last month, I came across a rather unlikely-sounding statistic suggesting that the Branca Distillery, makers of Fernet-Branca, are responsible for 75% of the world’s consumption of saffron.
This sounded rather implausible, so I did some maths. Approximately 300 tonnes or 661,386 pounds of Saffron are produced each year, at a wholesale value of about US$500 per pound. That means the wholesale market would be worth about $331 million. If Branca purchase 75% of that, then they’re spending about $250 million a year on saffron. I don’t know how many bottles of Fernet they produce a year, but it’s not that many.
I’m not sure where the story about Fernet and saffron originated, although a couple of websites cite an article that appeared a couple of years ago in a San Francisco newspaper. However it started, though, it’s now all over the internet. Writing the original piece, I let it go with something along the lines of “rumoured ingredients include saffron”.
Branca are rather secretive about the ingredients of Fernet, and only list a few of them on their own website. Actually, I rather suspect them of perpetrating the saffron story themselves, in order to increase the elaborate mythology that surrounds the drink (bear in mind, after all, that its invention has been variously credited to the “self-taught apothecary” Bernardino Branca, his daughter - or daughter-in-law - Maria Scala, and most notably the venerable Doctor Fernet Svedese, who may or may not have been Swedish but - either way - didn’t actually exist).
