The Italian aperitivo arrived in Australia as a cocktail and is settling in as a season. Google Trends data for the past decade shows four drinks on four quite different paths, and one of them is running away with it.
Figure 1: Australian search interest for four Italian drinks, January to November of each year, 2016 to 2026. Source: Google Trends.
Limoncello is the decade’s biggest riser — up roughly threefold since 2016 and, until this year, still climbing. The negroni rose fastest early, peaked in 2022, and has given back about a third since. Aperol spritz tripled between 2016 and 2019 and has been broadly flat for five years. Campari, the bitter that goes into both the spritz and the negroni, has not moved at all in ten years.
That last one is worth pausing on. Australians search for the drinks, not the bottle. The category has grown enormously; the ingredient brand sits exactly where it did in 2016.
The most seasonal drink in the country
Where the aperitivo really distinguishes itself is in the calendar. Measured against its own annual average, December searches for aperol spritz run at 284 per cent — nearly three times a normal month.
Figure 2: December search interest as a percentage of each term’s own annual average, 2016 to 2026. Source: Google Trends.
No other Italian drink comes close, and in the broader run of Australian search terms very few things of any kind swing that hard. Limoncello is second at 223 per cent, the negroni third at 172.
The full year shows why. Aperol spritz is at 150 per cent of its average in January, falls through autumn to a June low of 53 per cent, and then climbs steadily through spring before December arrives.
Figure 3: Average Australian search interest for “aperol spritz” by calendar month, as a percentage of its own annual average, 2016 to 2026. Source: Google Trends.
From trough to peak, that is a fivefold difference between June and December for the same drink. The commercial window is November to January and it is almost the whole business.
The ritual outlasts the drink
The steadiest term of the five is not a drink at all. “Aperitivo” — the hour, the ritual, the thing you do before dinner — runs at 124 per cent of its average in December, barely above an ordinary month, and it has grown every year without a peak and without a fall.
It is the smallest of the five terms by volume, and the only one still in a clean uptrend. If the spritz is a summer drink, the aperitivo is becoming a habit, and habits do not have seasons.
Sydney, and a suburb
New South Wales leads the country for “aperitivo” searches, ahead of Victoria — an unusual result for an Italian search term in Australia.
Figure 4: Search interest in “aperitivo” by state and territory, November 2021 to November 2026. Source: Google Trends.
The related searches point at why. “Aperitivo Leichhardt” is among the most-searched versions of the word in the country, and the fastest-rising searches attached to it are venue names — Torino Aperitivo in Melbourne, an aperitivo bar at Currumbin on the Gold Coast. As with nonna, the word is becoming a shopfront.
And as with nonna, a good share of Australians searching it do not yet know what it means: “aperitivo meaning” and “what is aperitivo” both rank among the top ten related searches.
About the data
Figures are from Google Trends for Australia and were collected on 6 November 2026. Google Trends measures relative search interest on a 0–100 scale rather than absolute search volumes, so numbers can only be compared within the same chart. Five search terms — “aperol spritz”, “negroni”, “aperitivo”, “limoncello” and “campari” — were compared on one shared scale from January 2016 to November 2026. Annual figures use January to November only, so that 2026 is compared like for like with earlier years and the December peak does not distort the trend. Seasonal figures average monthly search interest by calendar month across the whole period and express each month as a percentage of that term’s own all-period average. Google Trends data is aggregated and anonymous.
