Tag: Vermouth

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Vermouth Truth

Last week my fellow Spirits columnist Andria Lisle wrote about a bottle of Tribuno vermouth left by a departed father who was, evidently, a first-rate bartender. It reminded me when, in college, I’d carted some girl to New Orleans to meet my godparents. For all the city’s great food, Aunt Pouff (And no, I’m not making that name up) admitted that her favorite meal was “A bowl of salty treats and a martini with more vermouth than you children like these days.”

Which made her the first person I ever met who actually liked vermouth … or had lived 75 years entirely on hors d’oeuvres.

We all know the dry martini recipe that calls for whispering “vermouth” over ice-cold vodka. But as Pouff pointed out, “That’s not a martini; that’s just a cold hooker of vodka.” She then remarked that “martinis are made with gin.”
It’s likely that the reason most of us don’t like much, or any, vermouth in a martini is because nine times out of 10 the stuff we’re drinking is rancid. And if you are using vodka, the funk is all you will taste.

Vermouth isn’t a liquor; it’s fortified white wine — the light and dainty cousin of port or madeira. If refrigerated, it will last longer than a bottle of pinot gris, but the experts suggest you ought to throw the stuff out after a couple of months. It’s made from grapes such as Clairette Blanche and Bianchetta Trevigiana and a few others that you’ve never heard of — mainly because they don’t make very good wine. If they did, no one would be hiding the flavor with herbs, roots, and tree bark.

So yes, vermouth is made with regrettable white wine, to which is added a neutral grape spirit, and sometimes sugar water, which is poured into the aforementioned dry ingredients in a barrel and rolled around a bit. The first variants were made with wormwood, which the Germans called “wermut” and the French called that “vermouth.”

The Chinese were doing this 3,000 years ago, but, in 1786, a sweet wine was introduced to the royal court in Turin, Italy. They went wild and you really can’t buy word-of-mouth like that. A generation later, a pale, drier French version evolved. Both were aperitifs as well as medicine — which is as good a cure as any for sobriety. It would be another 100 years before it was so closely associated with cocktails and liquor. And, unfortunately, it got stuck behind the bar as opposed to being put in the fridge.

If you are going to stick to the classics — like martinis, Manhattans, and Rob Roys — a Tribuno or Martini & Rossi are hard to beat. Noilly Prat is a little darker and bolder, so be warned.

When the expatriates and the professionally fabulous were famously sipping vermouth on the Riviera, they weren’t drinking the stuff off the bottom shelf — and there is a difference. If you want to break out and be a little creative, Dolin has a Vermouth de Chambéry; a large bottle retails for $15. My personal favorite, a blanco Vermut Lustau, retails for $25. These are both clean and very crisp, and Vermut Lustau doesn’t have the vague bitterness that generally puts people off.

Last month, when the heat was really starting to get uppity, a friend introduced me to the following: One measure of vodka, one measure of Vermut Lustau, with tonic and a squeeze of citrus over ice. Not a twist or a thin wedge, you want a solid squeeze here, but just one. It works beautifully with gin as well, but the vodka lets the Lustau do what it does without the botanicals. As summer drinks go, this is one of the best I’ve discovered in a long time — it just floats over the weather.

And Pouff, if you can read this from that palm-lined boulevard in the sky, I use more vermouth than the children like these days.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Hot or Cold? Depends on What You’re Drinking

CREDIT: Steven Cukrov | Dreamstime

I distinctly remember visiting my twin brother at Ole Miss to see him and his friends with their hands crammed into coolers, spinning cans of beer in the ice. The trick was a new one to me at the time, because in Tuscaloosa you could buy cold beer, while in Oxford you had to buy it off the shelf. The whole point of the exercise was to bring the temperature of the beer down as quickly as possible. This was necessary because if you serve anything cold enough, your sense of taste is dulled. Given what we drank back then, the colder the better.

The trick did actually work — sort of — but it was also a lot of trouble. I drank whiskey.

The first time I went to the U.K., long before craft beer was a thing in the South, I was warned that the Brits drank warm beer. What I found was that their ales weren’t warm, they just weren’t ice cold like in America. Being a hell of a lot better than anything that I’d had at home, they didn’t have to be.

The same is true for wine: Temperature matters, a lot, in both storage and serving, so you want to get your numbers right. With whites and Champagnes, if you are drinking the stuff that gets served at typical fund-raisers or huge New Year’s Eve parties, like cheap beer, the colder the better.

Go up the ladder a bit to a nice Sauvignon Blanc, and you want to be a little more careful. If you don’t have a temperature-controlled storage, you’re fine keeping the whites in the fridge, but take the bottle out of the fridge about 15 minutes or so before serving. What you are shooting for is about 50o F — where it’ll still have a good chill, but the tastes will come alive.

Steven Cukrov | Dreamstime

Another one you want to keep in the fridge is Vermouth, which is a fortified wine, not a liquor. This is crucial. One reason we like those bitingly cold martinis is because most of us make the classic cocktail with vermouth that has gone off. It’s sort of like making a chocolate shake with sour milk. Fresh vermouth tastes completely different than what you are likely getting at a bar. Keep it in the fridge and throw it out after a few weeks.

Conventional wisdom holds that reds, on the other hand, work best served at room temperature. But remember the people who came up with that rule lived in drafty chateaux (or a drafty hovels) long before central heating. They wore heavy, form-fitting wool clothes that made everyone their own portable space heater. To that lot, room temperature wasn’t 74o F but somewhere between 60 and 65 degrees. Which is a pretty drastic swing. If you want to throw the red in the fridge for a few minutes before serving, that’s fine.

Do be careful; what wine really likes is consistency. Trying to chill wine quickly in the freezer is a bad idea. In fact, a drastic swing in any direction is bad. If you overdo it and decide to rewarm the bottle quickly, the wine will likely get some strange thoughts at odds with what the winemaker intended.

If you are really into it, and the above sounds fraught with peril, you can get a “wine cellar” that is no larger than a dorm-room fridge and costs about the same. It takes out the guesswork.

On the other end of the thermometer is Sake, which is supposed to be served warm, specifically at 98.4 degrees. Admittedly, I only know this from repeated childhood viewings of You Only Live Twice. I don’t claim to be a Sake expert, but years ago an undergrad with two very cold hands and a pair of almost-warm beers assured me that this was, in fact, true.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Grownup Drinks

As I’ve “grown up” career-wise, I’ve had to do quite a bit of on-the-job drinking. Of course, I drink for this gig — but I’m talking about my day job, the one that covers the majority of my bills, health insurance, and the like. I’m currently in transition, which has got me thinking about what it means to drink responsibly with coworkers, which is much different than being an ethical drinker at large.

Thankfully, I’ve never gotten smashed and photocopied body parts at a work party, made an untoward pass at a fellow employee, or woken up with any real regrets about how I’ve handled myself. I have, however, had to quickly transition from sitting at my desk to standing at a cocktail party with nothing but lunch in my stomach to pad the alcohol. I still haven’t mastered noshing on passed appetizers while juggling a wine glass and my purse, so I typically just sip one glass of white wine (okay, maybe two) and then excuse myself for dinner elsewhere.

When attending a work event, I’ve learned to pay close attention to company culture. At the end of the 1990s, I worked at a company that regularly rolled kegs into the employee cafeteria on Friday afternoons. Everyone would dutifully go a few rounds and then leave work to enjoy the weekend. I’ve also worked places where I didn’t trust my coworkers or my mouth, so I eschewed drinking and extricated myself from the conversation as quickly as possible. Now, most invitations to imbibe come at nighttime work events or when entertaining out-of-town visitors. On those occasions, I’ve learned to observe my immediate superior and never outpace them. I make it a point to eat before drinking, even if it’s a vending machine snack. I’ve also discovered low-alcohol cocktails, a delicious way to keep your wits and still enjoy a good drink.

Let’s start with what should be the obvious go-to: Campari and soda, made from the Italian liqueur that weighs in at around 20 percent ABV (alcohol by volume). Around since 1880, the distinctive red liqueur is created by infusing fruits and herbs in an alcohol and water blend. In Italy today, you can even buy a premixed Campari Soda, which has a very low ABV of 10 percent. Slightly bitter, Campari is always a sophisticated choice when you need to take it easy on the booze but still want to join in the fun.

Prosecco — Italian sparkling wine — also has a low ABV of under 12.5 percent. Spring and summer are the prefect times to drink it, whether you enjoy a glass on its own or add fruit for a cocktail. When peaches are in season, I always go for a Bellini, named for 15th-century Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini and first mixed at the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy, 72 years ago.

The Basque cocktail Kalimotxo is also easy on your liver. I was first introduced to this drink, a simple mix of equal parts Coca-Cola and cheap red wine, by a Basque guy who arrived in Memphis by way of Boise, Idaho, which has a Basque population some 15,000 strong. The Coke and wine blend makes for an overly sweet but quite sippable cocktail that I like to nurse in a red Solo cup at all-day festivals or sporting events.

Also worth drinking: the unsung work dog of cocktails, vermouth. The low-alcohol white wine, originally a “wormwood wine” devised as a cure for intestinal issues, comes in at about 18 percent ABV and makes for an interesting cocktail base on its own.

Ask your bartender to serve you ginger ale and dry vermouth with a squeeze of lemon. Or order an Addington, a jazz-age cocktail that consists of both sweet and dry vermouth, sparkling water, and an orange twist. Served in a martini glass, it can hold its own against any vodka cocktail. If that’s too fancy for you, go for the Americano. Not the coffee drink, but a cocktail created with equal parts sweet vermouth and Amaro liqueur, served on the rocks in a lowball glass and topped with soda.