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
