The Bellini has become one of the most iconic cocktails out there. Courtesy Belmond Hotel Cipriani

Before the Bellini became premixed slush poured from a carton at a nondescript hotel brunch, Harry’s Bar assigned one employee almost entirely to peaches each Venetian summer. From June through September, he cut and pitted small white peaches, squeezed them by hand, then pushed the juice and pulp through a fine conical sieve. Mixed with very cold Prosecco, the pale rose purée filled a small tumbler beneath a cap of foam. The recipe had two ingredients and a four-month season, but its birthday proved less tidy.

Harry’s Bar began with an improbable loan. According to the family account, Giuseppe Cipriani was tending bar at Venice’s Hotel Europa in the late 1920s when a young American guest named Harry Pickering became stranded without money. Cipriani lent him enough to get home. Pickering returned with the debt and additional capital for a bar, which opened under his first name in 1931. The 15-by-30-foot former rope store sat on a dead end near Piazza San Marco, where its privacy attracted an international crowd. Ernest Hemingway became a regular and used it as a setting in Across the River and Into the Trees, although the surviving record supports his punishingly dry Montgomery martini more firmly than any affection for Bellinis. Italy declared the room a national landmark in 2001.

“The Bellini is quintessential to Venice and Hotel Cipriani. A simple masterpiece by Giuseppe Cipriani, who founded the hotel in 1958,” Walter Bolzonella, former head barman at Belmond Hotel Cipriani, previously told Observer. “Over the past 40 years, I have not only served but created new cocktails for Hollywood royalty and presidents, but one thing has never changed. Mr. Cipriani made me promise to never change the method of preparing the Bellini cocktail—always and only fresh, ripe white peaches!”

Giuseppe Cipriani with Ernest Hemingway in Venice, 1948. Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images

Giuseppe is the constant in the Bellini’s origin story, but the year shifts. Cipriani’s main history says 1948, its food division 1949 and The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails around 1945. In The Harry’s Bar Cookbook, Arrigo Cipriani recalled that his father invented it “sometime in the thirties,” then named it for Giovanni Bellini during an exhibition he remembered as 1948. The catalog places that retrospective at the Doge’s Palace in summer 1949. Peach and sparkling wine may have preceded the name, though the record cannot say by how long. The signature hue offers no firmer clue. Cipriani’s current drinks shop points to the orangey-pink toga in St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, a vast canvas that Gentile Bellini began in 1504 and Giovanni completed after his brother’s death in 1507. Yet Mary McCarthy’s 1956 New Yorker dispatch from Venice found the Bellini sharing Harry’s Bar menu with drinks called the Giorgione and Tiziano. Painter names may have been a house idiom rather than coordinates leading back to one canvas.

McCarthy’s account confirms that the Bellini was established by 1956, and Harry’s Bar’s international clientele gave the drink ready couriers while a precise formula made it reproducible. Cipriani Food’s current recipe combines one part white peach purée with three parts very cold, dry Prosecco. Small, white-fleshed fruit passes through a food mill or ricer, then a fine sieve, preserving density and perfume without a blender’s air. Sugar syrup enters only when the peaches are tart, while yellow varieties stay out. The International Bartenders Association prefers a fruitier two-to-one ratio and a chilled flute. Harry’s Bar uses a slim tumbler.

Invented in Venice, the Bellini has made its way around the world. BILLY FARRELL/PatrickMcMullan.com

After two decades behind New York bars, including Daniel and Clover Club, Quality Branded beverage director Bryan Schneider judges a Bellini first by fragrance. His best Bellini came from peaches picked from a friend’s Hudson Valley tree at peak ripeness. “A ripe peach smells like a peach,” he tells Observer. Frozen purée and bottled nectar lose that perfume first. White peaches bring aroma without the blunt acidity or saturated color that can turn the drink into sparkling juice, while red veining around the stone supplies its blush. Prosecco contributes lift and dryness, but cannot rescue underripe fruit. A fluorescent-orange pitcher bears little resemblance to the pale original.

Fresh fruit once confined Harry’s Bar’s Bellini to June through September, even as the Cipriani name expanded beyond the bar. Giuseppe Cipriani opened Hotel Cipriani across the lagoon in 1958 and left when the property changed hands in 1976. When Harry Cipriani opened at the Sherry-Netherland in 1985, the Bellini gained a permanent New York address. The restaurant closely copied the Venice original, but the drink was already moving beyond Cipriani. By August 1987, Time found “Bellini and brunch” signs at fashionable restaurants across the country and a home mix sold nationwide. Another family entered the story the following year, when Luciano Canella’s winery in San Donà di Piave introduced a ready-to-serve Bellini. By 1991, Arrigo’s own cookbook directed readers to frozen French white peach purée, which allowed Harry’s Bar to serve the drink year-round. 

Arrigo Cipriani, Giuseppe Cipriani’s son, at Harry’s Bar in Venice. Universal Images Group via Getty

Year-round availability did little to soften the price. At Harry’s Bar, a Bellini cost €14, about $17 then, in 2005 and €22, about $24 then, in 2024. Canella erased the season from its bottled version. Its current three-to-one blend combines Brut with white peach juice and pulp, plus a little raspberry for color. Canella’s company history credits the bottle’s early success with opening foreign markets and says some of its white peaches still come from a grove Luciano planted nearby. Hotel Cipriani kept the old limit under different ownership. Now part of Belmond, LVMH’s hotel portfolio, and separate from the Cipriani restaurant group, the resort’s Bar Gabbiano still calls the Bellini its most requested cocktail but pours it only when ripe white peaches are available.

Once portable, the Bellini often turned orange and liqueur-sweetened, then arrived by the pitcher. At Quality Italian, Schneider wondered whether aroma alone could carry the drink. Drawing on Crystal Pepsi, the clear 1990s cola that kept the familiar flavor while losing its expected brown color, he sought the same “ontological shock.” He clarified the purée with agar, then carbonated the drink for service on tap. The glass turned clear while the peach aroma remained.

As the 2026 Venice Film Festival continues during the last weeks of white peach season, Harry’s Bar will fill with visitors who know the drink before the room. The glass will be small, its color closer to a washed fresco than orange juice. No surviving record assigns Cipriani’s experiment to a single year. Late summer supplies firmer evidence: a white peach ripe enough to perfume the room before the Prosecco is opened.