Drink in the Details: Vermouth, Gin's Forgotten Mistress
Drink in the Details is a monthly column highlighting spirits and classic cocktails written by DC Craft Bartenders Guild members Adam Bernbach (Bar Pilar) and Chantal Tseng (Tabard Inn).
There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for $5 to prove how needless it is. He then spends the remainder of the episode scrambling to recover it. While this might be a bit dramatic, it often proves to be an apt analogy for the loss of vermouth in our cocktail culture. Several decades ago, vermouth began its slow ebb from our drinks. Now, in this decade, we’ve come to wonder where the complexity, the balance, and, yes, the soul have gone from our most storied cocktails.
The most prominent illustration would be the Dry Martini. The term “dry” actually denoted the use of dry gin vs. older sweeter style gins and dry vermouth vs. sweet vermouth. In the original recipe, a dry gin and French (or dry) vermouth were seamlessly stirred in a ratio of 1:1 with a dash of orange bitters. It was stirred with a serenity typically reserved for raking a Zen garden. It was cool and silky in its texture, warm, spiced, and herbal in its tone. Slowly, the ratio crept up. Five parts gin…seven parts gin…ten parts gin…until the refrain “just look at the bottle of vermouth” became the popularly common instruction for its involvement. A throttled double of Tanqueray was strained into a V-glass with an olive. The beauty of the gin stood out there like a solo stripe of brilliant paint naked on a blank canvas. Remarkable, in and of itself, but certainly not a painting.
During 1813, in the Languedoc-Rousillon region of France, Joseph Noilly created the first dry vermouth, Noilly Prat. (Sweet vermouths were already in the drinking scene thanks to Antonio Carpano of Italy in 1786.) Noilly’s son and his son-in-law (that’d be the Prat) focused the recipe in 1855. They used the local white grapes, Picpoul and Clairette. They aged their white wine for several months through wildly changing weather conditions. Finally, they macerated a score of herbs and spices. From this production came an aromatized wine with enough tones, hues, and notes to assist in the production of a masterpiece. After its introduction into the U.S. markets in the 1880s, it wasn’t too long before our newly thriving cocktail scene birthed such an opus, the Martini. Juniper merged with chamomile, lemon, orange zest, coriander, nutmeg, and clove.
Image courtesy of ldanderson
Things change. The story of drinks and how we enjoy them meanders like the rest. Essentially, hundreds of vermouth-inspired cocktails came about before and after the turn of the 20th century. Most were subtle variations from the Manhattan and the Martinez. (The Dry Martini being our prime example of one of them, but how often do you see a Rob Roy or a Bobbie Burns get ordered?) And yet, with all these recipes, only the Martini and the Manhattan stay afloat, and barely at that. While the sweet vermouth component in the latter might get a more noticeable dose in your average version, the dry vermouth in a martini is usually the dusty bottle from which bartenders are afraid to let more than a drop or two escape.
Why, exactly? The answer, likely, resides in a mixture of popular health and tastes. Before Prohibition, drinking herb-infused wines, spirits, and bitters had a cleaner, more medicinal image. It was considered healthy, the Gilded Age version of putting nutritional supplements in a smoothie or drinking acai berry juice. Leading up to Prohibition, the temperance lobby chipped away at these widespread beliefs. In the years since, the fields of modern medicine and nutrition have developed more fully, moving away from colloquial, herbal tonics. As far as taste, the national palate for vodka grew to the point it overtook gin in sales in 1967. With this, vermouth was no longer an ingenious partner in an inspired marriage, just one of the billion things that work with vodka, a spirit that has no major idiosyncrasies.
By the 1980s, it had changed enough that the things we imbibed were seventh grade science fair projects made from Baileys and Rose’s grenadine. Vermouth was relegated to a shelter for besotted fruit flies. A decade later, with new and unprecedented wealth, people began looking to the past for symbols of their status. And there’s nothing more urbane and classic than a Martini. Problem was, it’d been so long that no one really knew how to drink them. We knew the silvery gleam of vodka or gin chilled. The Glass. Of course, we knew “The Glass.” Still, we didn’t know exactly for what or why it was great. It was style, but not substance. Today, with this resurgence of interest in cocktails, we can look to the wonder of what made it great; that the vermouth might no longer be ignored. That vermouth can bring back the balance.
Obviously, we’re not talking about cutting edge molecular mixology. This isn’t the freshest, latest trend in the cocktail world. Nor is this a call for a return to the old for its own sake, a nostalgia-laced howl at the moon. This is realizing that the Rembrandts are behind you, when you’ve been staring at the trimming on the wall. It’s Bart retrieving his soul.
The Original Dry Martini Recipe (1895-1915)
Chill a cocktail glass. (If you're hurting for freezer space, you can fill it with ice water.) In a mixing tin or bar glass, add 1½ oz. of dry gin (Beefeater works great), 1½ oz. Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth and 2 dashes of Orange Bitters (Bitter Truth is a favorite, but Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6 is acceptable and much easier to acquire). Then add enough ice to fill and STIR with mixing spoon about 25-30 times. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and cut about 1½ inches of a lemon twist (try to avoid too much pith) to garnish.
On a personal note: we enjoy a slightly more potent 3:1 ratio of gin to vermouth.