I'm Shonda Rhimes. If you watch Grey's Anatomy or any of my TV shows, you know, I love to tell a good story. Well, now there's Sandland Audio. We partner I heart radio to launch a slate of great podcasts. You can listen to the first four right now. Katie's Grib criminal. You go Ascoli and you down and we have so much more coming your way we can't wait for you to hear it all. Welcome to Shadowland Audio.

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Welcome to criminalise a production of Shadowland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to Criminality. This season, we are exploring the lives and motivations of some of the most notorious lady poisoners in history. I'm Maria Tomoaki. And I'm Holly Fry. And today's episode is about a woman with an infamous reputation as a political schemer and poisoner in 15th century Italy. So we'll be talking about the Borgia family, specifically the notorious Lucretia Borgia, who was born in April of 14, 80, just outside of Rome.

Lucretia was the illegitimate daughter of future Pope Alexander the sixth at the time of her birth, though he was still known as Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and his favorite mistress, but not, say, de Katani was her mother and she was also the mother of Lucrezia, two dashing and handsome older brothers, Cesare, which is the Italian form of the name Caesar and Giovanni, the Italian equivalent of John.

Now, it may sound odd to us today a Roman Catholic cardinal with a mistress or more, but potent cardinals were pretty much expected to have mistresses during this time in Italy.

It was totally normal. And this was not just a thing with the boorishness.

So Lucrezia was born during the Italian renaissance, which spanned from 13, 20 to 15, 20, and she grew up at a time when artists and scientists were becoming not only appreciated, but also highly respected. And on the day she was born, her father summoned astrologers who at that time were considered scientists to their home to tell the future of his newborn. And we know that they foretold a remarkable future for her. But the details of that remarkable future have since been lost to history.

And while we can't know what their predictions were, whether or not they came true, we do know that she did grow up in a very prominent family and that family was very scandalous. But even if you haven't seen the television series The Borgias, you have almost certainly heard this family's name and maybe even know some of the family's legacy.

Lucrezia was born into one of the most well known families in history, the Borgia family included military leaders, Duke's two popes and even a saint.

Yet the legacy of the Bushes is not one of generosity or inspiration or saintliness in any way. Their reputation actually was more for greed, violent political corruption, megalomania and power hungry control over vast regions of Italy and the family's alleged immorality and corruption.

Whether that's all true or not, date all the way back to Alfonse de Borgia, who was born in the 13th hundred or so centuries worth of drama.

Yes, their story line goes way back. But with the Borgias, the you know, I mean, it does go way back. And the apple today and then does not fall far from the tree. So first there was Lucretius father Rodrigo, who was a cardinal and was accused of buying the papacy, and he probably did. Yeah.

In fact, it was believed by many that he had, quote, given his soul and body to the great demon in hell that he probably didn't do.

But you never know.

We just don't know what happened in the 15th century.

I believe that he believed if he did indeed believe it, if it was believed it was true.

So Lucrezia had two brothers, which we mentioned earlier, and Giovanni was assassinated in 14, 97 under mysterious circumstances and by mysterious circumstances.

And you can you can hear my air quotes.

I think when I say that, we mean that his power hungry brother may have murdered him in a fit of jealousy.

But but but maybe not. It's equally possible that Giovanni was killed while having an affair that went wrong or possibly in an argument with a non-family member, a Borgia.

So this we're talking about, because this is the environment in which Lucretia was born into so we can get back to her now.

So Lucrezia was not raised by her parents. She was instead sent to live with her father's cousin, who was a widower living in a palace in Rome, and she was educated at the Convent of Saint Sixtus. She was really well educated for a woman in the fifteen hundreds. And she was able to converse and write in several languages, including Italian, French, Latin and Greek. She was considered, and we're quoting a model of good breeding.

And that quote comes up in various forms, but in so many places.

She, though, is yet often maligned.

And Lucrecia has long been characterized in literature, films and, you know, just various forms of art as a woman who was vicious, extravagant and also guilty of nepotism, incest and murder, which the poisons fit in there, kind of like the description of anyone else in the Borgia family as a whole clan throughout their history.

And here is where we want to turn our focus. Was she actually guilty of the many bad acts she is accused of having done?

Because that list is pretty long, man. So in fact, they're the real life, the Christian. They have been much different than the stories we think of when we think of her and her family. So today, scholars actually believe that there probably isn't enough proof that she was a political schemer and murderer herself, like her notorious family members, but that instead she may have been a political pawn that was used by her father for family gain.

So let's lay that all out. Before we do that, we're going to take a quick break and have a word from a sponsor. And when we come back, we'll be talking about Lucretius, three marriages.

I'm Shonda Rhimes. If you watch Grey's Anatomy or any of my TV shows, you know, I love to tell a good story. Well, now there's Sandland Audio. We partner with I Heart Radio to launch a slate of great podcasts. You can listen to the first four right now. Katie's Grib criminal. You go ask Ali and you down and we have so much more coming your way. We can't wait for you to hear it all. Welcome to Shadowland Audio.

Listen to all the new Sandland audio shows on Apple podcasts.

Welcome back to criminality. Let's talk about Latricia's marriages and how each was designed to politically advanced the Borgia family.

So Lucrezia is described as having light blue, green eyes and wavy golden hair. It is said that she later bleached that hair to maintain its coldness.

I love that I. I actually when I saw that detail, I was like, she the first bottle blonde, like, I believe bleach. I wonder she went platinum.

Like, I just loved that detail about how she was like, I'm not going gray, I will just stay golden like and like her mother, she was considered to be a great beauty.

The famous painting known as Disputation of Saint Catherine is actually said to have been modeled after her. And it was written that her whole being exuded and we quote gaiety and humor, and it was often noted that she was quite graceful, definitely not the kind of thing that goes alongside with. She was a horrible scheming monster, you know.

But anyway, you know, so she was married three times and all three times.

It was not for love. Her marriages were all strategic and they all were to align the Borgia family with other influential families. They were all relatively easy for her father to do. And, you know, a marriage wasn't a big deal back then. You weren't in love. You were just building the family's political power.

And as we get into her relationships, we got to get this part of the way first. Yes, there are many, many stories about orgies and incest among the Borgias, but there's no evidence like literally using big zero. Lucrezia slept with her father or her brother, both of which are rumors that have persisted through time century.

It's just like the orgies her father was said to have hosted. There's simply no proof that they or these stories of incest are in any way true affairs, though.

Absolutely. But but that's not to say very well. Historians consider this to all be rumor and exaggeration. And I am sorry to break the news.

This is the big stories of the Borgias, but they're all kind of fairy tales, stories not as fun and salacious, but they're not sorry. Let's do, though, talk about her marriages, because they are, you know, in their own way, they have their own problems. So the first time Lucrezia was engaged, she was just 11 years old.

We have talked before about how, you know, as was the case and is the case here where this is for political gain. It has very little to do with the actual marriage and more of just like a business contract. Correct.

We've seen six year olds and three year olds who've been engaged to each other, which is. Just I don't even have a word for it, but a political party, I'll just say yes. Yeah. And so this first engagement was to a Spanish nobleman, and it was arranged by her father, who at that point had ascended to become Pope Alexander the Sixth. I hear he paid for it. Right. That's the rumor.

It was a cash transaction, but wanting to align themselves then politically within Italy, her father and brother decided to call off that engagement. Instead, Lucrezia would marry Giovanni Vaught's a man in his late 20s who was unfortunately best known for his vicious temper.

Yeah, so they married in Rome in fourteen ninety three, but not long into the marriage. Lucretius father and brother became interested instead in aligning themselves politically with Spain and also with Naples, and they no longer saw a need for Geovani so worried that he was losing favor with the Borgias and he was in fact losing favor with the Borgias.

Giovanni fled for his life.

The marriage was annulled by Pope Alexander under the pretense that it was never consummated. However, when the marriage was officially annulled in 14 '97, Lucrezia was six months pregnant, so that would suggest that that marriage was consummated definitely the with someone which would have made it way more problematic to annul it in the Catholic Church. Correct. Rumors swirled throughout the country as to who the father of this child might be.

So there were reports of her pregnancy, but they were initially refuted. And in March 14, 1980, she gave birth to a son so you could no longer refute that pregnancy. She named him Geovani and the baby was born in secret.

And he wasn't actually revealed to the public until he was about three years old.

And her pregnancy and the secrecy surrounding it, of course, actually made the whole situation worse because it kicked the rumor mill into its highest possible gear because her son's paternity was never established, gossipers kind of went crazy. They could just run with it because there is nothing to refute them.

It was suggested in this gossip and rumor mill that the baby was a product of incest. Here we go, right from either her brother or maybe her father. The baby was not a product of incest, but it is possible that she'd had an affair with her father's chamberlain, Pedro Calderone.

And though they were married when she got pregnant, no one actually ever assumed it was her husband. Giovanni's child Romanes even went so far as to question whether or not Lucretia was actually the baby's mother. Like they took it that far. I like they somehow introduced this problematic child just for fun. Right? You just appear at someone else's and she's raising it.

Won't say who.

Yeah, Lucretia was not single for long, despite all of this madness and scandal surrounding her, her father and brother. And by now you can see exactly who was really running this family and running. Lucretius Life chose 17 year old Alfonso of Aragon, who was the illegitimate son of Alfonso, the second, the king of Naples, to be Lucretius second husband. So a lot of Tu's in that one. Yeah, second husband, Alfonso, the second get the astrologers on the line.

There's meaning here. The pair were married in fourteen ninety eight, so she she wasn't single for very long, like we were saying, this is a very fast marriage put together and it was said that Alfonso was handsome and he had good manners. And unlike many or most political marriages that we talk about, the evidence actually suggests that the two of them did love each other or at least were really rather fond of each other.

They had one child together, two, and they named him Rodrigo after her father.

But just a year into that second marriage, which was going quite well, Alexander and Chisari considered the partnership a political hindrance. So, yes, again, they just mercurial whims of their political desires.

Now, they wanted to align politically with France.

And so fearing for his life, Alfonso fled Rome and actually for good reason because in 1900, the Christian brother tried to have Alfonso assassinated by stabbing, but it failed.

And it's reported that he then visited her husband's bedside to deliver a chilling message.

What was not finished at breakfast would be complete by dinner, which is, you know, I have this, like, vision of him, like crawling into the window and like sliding into the bed, like whispering into his ear and then came.

Right. Real creepy about the whole thing. I know.

Like a spirit that's come in from nature.

And really it just, you know, it's kind of boring to ask a charming charming at every turn. Now, depleted is an option that's out. He decided that the next manner of approach would be strangulation, and this assassination attempt did work and it left his sister, a widow. And Lucretia was sent to the countryside to mourn and allegedly because her brother and her father grew tired of watching her grieve, which to me is a detail that seems very bourgeois ask, doesn't it?

They're like, why do you keep crying? Get her out of here.

Just send her to Tuscany for a little while. So when she did return to Rome, she actually began working for her father.

And basically she did some secretarial work for the papal court and that included responding to his mail when he was away.

Now that we know that there may actually have been more to it, and this kind of jibes with what historians today believe, that she was frequently left in charge of the people caught during her father's absence. And that is a huge detail because she was a woman after all. And this is a very powerful place to have that much free reign.

Some actually also go on to suggest that because she was frequently left in charge of the court, she was not the pawn that some historians believe she may have been and that instead she was given a unique position of power for any woman at this time.

And it's it's really hard to know just how involved she she really was able to be.

And really, we should point out that these two things could simultaneously be true, which would have made for a very strange dichotomy in her life. True. So she may have had a great deal of reach and power as her father's trusted assistant in the papacy and also have had very little to no control over the arrangements of her personal life.

And I think that that might be on to something.

There certainly sounds like it because of the political motivations of her father and brother. Again, Lucretia was yet married a third time and her third husband, again, was not of her own choice.

So in February 15 two, she wed widower Alfonso Gestae, Duka Ferreyra. And although this was an arranged marriage, it said that Lucretia was actually pretty eager to marry Alfonso because it meant that she could leave Rome, get away from her father and brother and live in northern Italy.

She could just have a little space of her own where they were not up in her business at every moment.

HACKLEY They're not like your marriage is over, your marrying number 10 now. You know, she's like, I just want to I want to get out.

And I think that's very telling about the kind of life that she wanted to lead versus the kind of life that she was being told to lead. But let's talk about her husband, Alfonso, the third husband, because the second husband was also Alfonso, just for a quick minute, because he's kind of an interesting man.

On one hand, he was into artillery and tournaments, dogs, horses.

He he made pottery. He played the violin, which is a musical instrument that was popular during the Renaissance. It was at six strings. I know you're probably trying to, like, envision a viola or a violin, but it didn't truly look like that. It was held vertically.

It was played with a bow. Yet, on the other hand, he was also well known for his cruelty and his stinginess and just kind of strange behavior in general.

I looked and looked for what kind of strange behavior Alfonso might have engaged in. And I I mean, maybe tell me you're not curious. I said, but I actually came up with very little so I would qualify as extreme.

Right. You know, did he was he the kind of guy you just walk to the mailbox in his boxers, or was he really strange?

Like, I don't I don't know. And like your imagination, you can sort of take it to many places where history is not really taking.

But those two things together made me feel like he was actually seemed to really love him, like he seemed like this was also another good relationship for her. And scholars believe that Lucretia became both a very capable and popular duchess while she was married to him. She was a patron of the arts, that was, and the art community was flourishing during the Renaissance. And as she grew older, she devoted herself to various charities. And much like how she managed the papal court when her father was away, she also administered the affairs of state when her husband was away.

If it seems that history has turned the Borgias into a twisted and tangled story, perfect for a primetime drama, it surely may have. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, their legacy is so strong that it has literally been turned into a primetime drama.

Yes, not one that I have ever watched. But yet it seems like it really kind of leans toward the the fantasy of what the Borgia family may or may not have been so well.

It's actually long scenes of bleaching. That's really all it is.

I should watch a quick way to do my route by the creation of Persia, so they were definitely guilty as a family of nepotism and simony.

And let's face it, I mean, they were surely criminals of one sort or another. But historians today believe that it is actually unlikely that the clan was actually any worse than any other family who was continually vying for the throne during the Italian renaissance. Yeah, the papacy and all of that is so tied up in so many machinations throughout the aristocracy there, it's it's funny that this one family got separated out. Yes. They absolutely surely took bribes. Yes, they definitely had affairs.

They 100 percent took advantage of any and every situation where they could use it to advance their family's power. And they surely did order the assassination of more than one rival. They certainly did not hesitate to get rid of Lucretius. Second husband, if you recall. And Lucrezia couldn't wait to get away from them.

And I think that's very telling.

But why their story is so outrageous compared to other contemporary political families is kind of a little bit strange.

Right? You'd think that everybody to get treated, at least sort of vaguely equally, everyone was power hungry and everyone was corrupt.

But there are a couple of things in play, right, that blame to some degree why they became kind of the the apex vision of all of this greed and power mongering.

One big problem for The Borgias, as we have seen before in other episodes, is that they suffered the ill fortune of having been foreigners in a country that hated foreigners. Yes, if you were not from Italy at this time, it was believed that you were most likely to be corrupt and vile. And the Borgias were not originally from Italy. They were Spaniards and they were trying to rule Italy. So it's like a double down on their their vileness.

How Horie entice you monsters?

Spanish propaganda in Italy was really popular at this time, and it painted all Spaniards as brutal and oppressive. But you probably don't get an expression like and I'm quoting here, and many of you probably have heard this quote before, if you if you want to live, don't dine with the Borgias.

And few who have dined with the Borgias have lived to tell of it.

If you're not at least a tiny bit, just a little bit murderous people say that about my house all the time.

Yeah, I don't need a holiday break. Really. Like, right. She's going to cook some weird thing and you're not going to want to eat it.

Many borscht stories actually are centered around Lucretius brother Cesare and his appetites. And those appetites are, of course, greed and lust and power and murder. That's pretty well documented. And it is pretty fair to say that murder by poison has long been associated with this family name. But that doesn't mean that every Borgia was guilty of any of these acts.

Some probably didn't do any of the poisoning. Right.

Some just wanted to move away.

Oh, please do marry me off again. That would be great. Love to go to northern Italy, get rich from here.

So we're going to take this opportunity for a quick break and a word from our sponsor. But when we come back, we'll be talking finally right about the Borgia family's poisonous legacy. Welcome back to Criminal, where we are about to start getting into the Borgias secret recipe for poison. I know. Isn't that like that's that that they have a secret family recipe. I love it.

So keep thinking about, like, ads for companies that make food to talk about their longstanding family recipe. Should we slow cooker boys in with an 11 year old?

Boys are seasonal summer poisons. It's a craft poison it. It's made with heritage arsenic.

So we are finally here at the poisons.

And when it comes to poisons, Lucretius father and brother likely did use many, many of them to their political advantage. And as did many other politically important families at the time, not just the Borgias, like we were saying, but it was rumored that the pair poisoned a cardinal or maybe two, maybe maybe more.

But again, one of those stories that modern scholars think is probably unlikely just because everyone else was doing it doesn't mean that the Borgias were also doing it.

But it does make their salacious stories way more fun.

So we have spent a lot of time throughout this entire season talking about poison being used as a political tool used all the way back into antiquity during the Italian renaissance.

Poisonings were so frequent that most people assumed when anyone of royalty or a pope or a cardinal died, basically anyone with any kind of shred of power, it was probably not a natural death. We see that so often.

Right. Right. Because this was kind of just a common way for people to go about their affairs unhindered by the person who had been blocking those affairs. Exactly.

And there's a lot to choose from. Doesn't always have to be arsenic, which the Borgias at least show us that there is a rainbow of poisons available to us to use.

There is an interesting history about this family and poisons, and it's said that they were known to use several types.

Like I was just saying, when we see a lot in this show, which is arsenic, because it's odorless and it's tasteless and you can mix it into things and you won't be there when the person dies. And it's a popular poison. But they also used several other slow acting and powerful poisons, which included strychnine and cantharidin, which you probably know as Spanish fly in larger quantities. It won't just engorged your genitals, it will kill you and the flower wolfsbane.

So poisons would be added to food and drinks, clothes, gloves, which you talked about before, pages of books.

Right. And even flower, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah. Don't smell the tulips. Don't do it. Tasting the Cup of the Borgias came to be a euphemism for death by Persia.

That's a bad way to die, but it's a good turn of phrase.

There are stories describing poisonous bubbles which were formed and placed in fireplaces. And when you burned them, they would produce toxic fumes that would wafts through the house and kill people.

That was an interesting one.

But where they actually kind of jump ahead of their peers in the art of poisoning is how they selected and mixed their poisons.

So it's said that the Bourges did that and they would make rare poisons because they're apparently porridges can't just use arsenic and mix them in their cellars with like consider it with as much thought as if you were, say, making or storing vintage wines.

They had poisons.

So their ideal poison was reliable, effective, deceptive and slow acting, but strong enough to kill the victim, which, of course, when it comes to poison, every single one of those attributes totally makes sense. Right?

I mean, I see that they had a list they're checking out. They're like, yep, does it does it all as it should.

It's a poison. That's their cue, which is like, you know what? It's it's not deceptive, but it is reliable and effective.

They've got a big white board. They've got it off flow, chart it out, you know.

So the family's poison legacy is also said to have included a secret family recipe for a poison called Cantarella. And it was a variation on arsenic, plus a few other deadly ingredients. So if you didn't happen to have arsenic on hand, you could still make it and you could still kill someone. But the complete composition of what it was remains mostly unknown, except for kind of one or two ingredients. We don't really know how to put it together, which is probably a good thing.

Yeah, interestingly, the family took Cantarella so seriously that it was one of those things that was only found. Barricaded in their own cellars, and it had, as Maria said, this secret list of ingredients and it mimicked the properties of arsenic, perfect for its odorless and flavourless nature, whatever it was, was kind of the perfect poison, at least by bourgeois standards.

Right. It hit all of those bullet points. We do know, though, there's this one ingredient. It's so gross. But apparently it was used in the composition of Cantarella and it was an important ingredient in his poison, which is. Yuck, yuck. Let me tell you, the good news is, I suppose you would be deceased and not have time to be grossed out when you realized what you had consumed. OK, so a little bit of science alkaloids which are naturally occurring.

Organic compounds that contain nitrogen were not unheard of in the poison business. In fact, for example, the poison strychnine is an alkaloid, right? Not not not out of the realm of possibility that a lot of others had them, but alkaloids that were used in the Borgias favorite poison. This is where it starts to get gross. And if you don't want to hear about animals and grossness, just skip ahead 20 seconds.

Right. OK. I mean, they got uncomfortable reading it. I understand. If you could just skip ahead. But they were obtained from poisoned pigs that they'd poisoned with arsenic and it gets worse.

Multiple accounts refer to how it was the froth from around the pig's mouth that was collected and then stored for Cantarella making. It's awful. Yeah. Take a moment. It is so awful. But here is the thing. It it was actually a common practice to suspend a poison like arsenic in animal fat. So this pig story is actually pretty plausible. Historically, it's it probably is.

I always wonder, like, who's the person that gets that idea and goes, you know, what we got to do? Yeah.

Is poison a pig and then collect the froth around that.

And that's what we're going to use for our poison. So symptoms of being poisoned by Cantarella include a lot of the usual stuff that we have seen and we've talked about poisoning before, so the victim would experience confusion, vomiting, abdominal pain and probably diarrhea, all of which could mimic several other conditions, as well as several other poisons. It is said that this could kill with precision timing. So depending on how you manage the dose, you could make sure they died the same day or even in a week, just, you know, on carefully measuring out.

And there was, of course, no antidote.

Right.

And it was so potent that the poison became known as the liquor of succession, meaning it was perfect for eliminating other cardinals and other people in positions of power, but probably made by Cardinal Law as needed or Rodrigo and his family to get ahead.

Now, there is a very popular story about how Lucrezia wore a poison filled ring sprinkling Cantarella from it into wine glass.

One of my favorite stories about Lucretia. Oh, it's a great story.

And who doesn't love a poison ring?

But this doesn't appear to have actually been true if there was a poison ring in the Borgia family, and that is a big if it is believed that it was Cesare who actually wore it, I believe it just written about him.

I believe it. So the truth about this alleged notorious lady poisoner is that it's unlikely that she ever poisoned anyone at all.

And some scholars, modern scholars like to tell a joke here. And I we're going to follow suit because it's dead accurate. So instead of poisoning, it was Lucretia herself who was poisoned by the pen of history.

That's how it goes.

How can you not laugh when you hear that like it's perfect?

I think I more laughed at your dramatic delivery and scream. That's OK. I practiced.

So although of course, it is way more interesting to think that she was as corrupt as history has suggested throughout the centuries. But Lucrezia was actually generally admired and respected in her time by her contemporaries.

So it seems pretty clear, looking at modern research and documents from contemporary scholars that Lucretia boorishness reputation does not at all precede her and that the stories of her as a poisoner and generally as a wicked woman are completely undeserved.

As for Alexander and Cesare, we hope that the story that they died from accidental Cantarella poisoning were true.

We wish it's not true, but I like the idea that the ironic story would be there, but it is not. And sadly, Lucretia, ah, she died at the age of 39, just 10 days, about a week to 10 days after giving birth to a stillborn daughter. And it said that Alfonso wept at the loss of and we quote his sweet companion.

So at least she got a quiet end to her life. Yeah, you know, moving out of Rome was a great thing for the Irish and moving away from her family seems to have done her really well, although history doesn't seem to tell us that. Lucrecia didn't have any poison, but Holly, what's yours? Well, OK, I know everybody thinks I'm going to do something gross here. I'm not. The thing that I kept thinking about when trying to come up with a good cocktail for her was her many weddings.

And I thought about wedding cocktails and the kinds of drinks that you're often served, like the signature cocktail wedding.

Right. And since she had three, I came up with a cocktail that I am calling thrice wed. And it starts with three fruits, one to represent each of her husband. So you're going to have some watermelon and some plum and some apricots. You know, Italy is the largest producer of apricots in the European Union. I did not know that. That's I love. I did not know. A little a little fun factoid for you today, so I'll go with the cup, a quarter cup of each of those fruits diced, you know, just roughly chopped, throw them in the blender.

You're going to just crank that up and let them go until they're smooth. For me, the what I really like about it is that it smooths out and it's this very pretty kind of pink color, but the skins of the plums don't completely break up. So you have these little dark flecks in it, which is kind of pretty. And so then you take that blended fruit and you pour it, you fill half of a champagne flute or a scoop with it and then add five drops of bitters on top.

I used hella hella mccoole tiki bitters, but whatever bitter you prefer is probably fine. And then I just put a little bit of prosecco in and I mixed it with a cocktail spoon just to get everything smoothed out because otherwise sometimes the alcohol will just float on top of the fruit and you don't get the you want them to definitely combine and then you can just finish filling it up with Prosecco and you can keep stirring as you go if you want, or you can just top it off.

I'm so excited to tell you how delicious this one was, because I will completely I have been very frank before on the show that, like, I'm not a bartender, I just like to play in the kitchen and play with my blender and make up cocktails. And so often one of the things that I'm never very good at is balancing a cocktail. There's always something that's driving the bus.

But in this case, all of these things balance each other so beautifully that none of them overwhelms it. Like you don't drink it and go, Oh, Prosecco, and you don't drink it and go, oh, watermelon. Oh, that's like it really makes this beautiful, unique flavor that isn't any one of those things. It's all of those things very much in the Christian beverage.

I think you nailed it.

I hope and it is super delicious. And I made too much. I started with like way too much fruit. So then I was like, well, I have to just keep pouring them because I have so, so much fruit.

I don't want it to go to waste, like be like over incorporating into something else.

I just lost it.

Even got the seal of approval from husband Brian, who, as we've said before, is not a drinker. But he was like, this is delicious. So I, I think it's a good thing. It's a little it's a little bit summery for this time of year. But those bitters that I used to have, things like cinnamon and allspice in them, so it warms it up just a little and makes it feel like a late summer, early fall.

I think this is great.

Like there have been many drinks that you have done so far that you have liked, but there have only been a couple where you've been like this drink is great and I love hearing that it's right up there with white Tode for me is like my greatest contributions to the world.

Okay, I was thinking I was actually thinking specifically of White Tode when I was thinking about drinks that you have loved. This one also very delicious. And I didn't it's another one that I didn't know if I'd be super into it. I'm not that big of a Prosecco drinker. I'm not really big on fruity drinks usually. But this one is just me.

But apparently when you combine them all together, you find them delicious. It's like a Prosecco smoothie.

It's fantastic, actually, exactly what it sounds like. A smoothie with a little bit of bitters. We hope that you give it a whirl. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I did not want to have, you know, five cocktails so you can make this as a non-alcoholic version. And instead of Prosecco, use something like a ginger ale or even a club soda. But if you still use those bitters, you get like a nice little little something in it that tastes more like a smoothie unless, like, you're just having, like, a fruity soda.

So that's another option if you are not a drinker. Yes. You want to make sure everybody can enjoy all of these yummy fruits. Also, I should point out, in case you're doing any calendar math and you're like, hey, those fruits aren't all going to be in season at the same time.

Right now, they're not. I used canned apricots. I'm confessing to you now and they were fine.

You're going to blend them anyway. It's right. There's no shame in a canned fruit, in a mixed drink. And and like I said, you can sub out non-alcoholic things for the Prosecco and still get a really yummy, delightful taste adventure. All right. Thank you so much for listening to us blather on about fruit and blenders as well as poison.

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