Chartreuse gets the cult treatment — allocation lists, secondary-market markups, bartenders rationing it like it's rationing them. Meanwhile a whole family of Alpine bitters sits one shelf over, unbothered, doing arguably more interesting work in a glass.
Gentian liqueurs — Suze, Salers, Avèze — trace back to Alpine gentian root macerated in alcohol, a tradition Imbibe traces to Bavaria in the 1600s before it found its commercial footing in 19th-century France with Salers' bittersweet aperitif. That's real depth. And unlike Chartreuse, nobody's out here rationing a bottle of Suze. Bartenders just reach for it.
At Kiesling in Detroit, Kira Ellington built the Suze Greenburg — carrot juice, mezcal, honey, amaro — around gentian's ability to bridge vegetal and sweet, a drink named after a Phish song before it was reverse-engineered into something coherent, per Imbibe. GM Jeremy Ross calls gentian "fairly versatile," and he's not wrong: it turns a White Negroni, holds up a Martini, sings in a highball. In Austin, Sean Skvarka and Matt Ross took a Black Manhattan, swapped in Suze at Whisler's, and got the Southern Gentleman — brighter, funkier, more patio than parlor, without pretending to reinvent anything, again per Imbibe.
Génépy, the artemisia-based alpine liqueur, is a related but distinct story — a Chartreuse cousin that went from après-ski obscurity to backbar staple as domestic producers entered the category, according to Punch. Dante's Alpine Negroni stirs gin, Cocchi Americano, and Suze with génépy's herbal lift. At ABV in San Francisco, Ryan Fitzgerald pours it ice-cold with a few dashes of Angostura, treating it the way you'd treat a good amaro — as a drink, not just an ingredient — per Punch. Zac Sorensen's Swiss Kiss, described by Toby Maloney as "cool and sophisticated as a Swiss diplomat at a party of spies," pairs it with gin and absinthe, again via Punch.
None of this is secret. It's just quiet. Punch's own recent roundup of underrated gin classics makes the same point about a different corner of the canon — plenty of "minor classics" hiding in plain sight because nobody's built a scarcity narrative around them, per Punch.
The lesson isn't that gentian liqueurs are underrated in some abstract sense. It's that scarcity and quality got conflated somewhere along the way, and an entire category of genuinely well-made, well-priced, easy-to-find bottles is paying the reputational price for behaving itself.