Anise-flavored spirits can be polarizing—you either love or hate offerings like sambuca, pastis and absinthe. Greeks, however, are firmly in the love category. While ouzo is typically the first drink that comes to mind, they’re also partial to mastiha, a semi-sweet, piquant and uniquely invigorating liqueur worth discovering. Though anise-free, mastiha is sometimes described as having a flavor that combines fennel, anise and mint.
What Is Mastiha?
Chios Mastiha spirit, or simply mastiha, is a Greek liqueur flavored with the resin of the mastic tree. The species grows throughout the Mediterranean and is cultivated as an ornamental plant globally. However, the only trees in the world that produce this precious and highly aromatic resin, sometimes referred to as “liquid gold,” exist in the southern part of one Greek island: Chios.
This UNESCO-protected cluster of twenty-four villages, known as the Mastichochoria, plays host to groves of mastic trees that are carefully tended year-round. Of the area’s one-time population of 1.5 million trees, approximately 250,000 were burned in a series of wildfires that ravaged the island in 2012, rendering the sap even more precious.
Why Chios and nowhere else? It’s a mystery, admits Konstantinos Chantzis, former head bartender at Nammos, Mikonos, and bar manager of NYC’s Kyma Group. “Is it the wind, the ground, the people?” he asks with a shrug and a huge smile. “Whatever it is, it’s insane!” He explains that despite efforts to transplant the trees elsewhere, including Samos—an island just south of Chios in the Aegean Sea—the trees will not produce resin.