We’ve chosen a seasonally apt theme for our first tasting since the pandemic hit us hard in 2020: vermouth, and how to put it in your mouth. I can think of few wines that make for such a consummately refreshing apéritif after a day spent schlepping hither and yon in the heat and dust of the dog days of summer. And yet I cannot think of a wine here in the States that is more misunderstood, neglected, and maltreated than vermouth, as it is a category-defying drink that we mostly relegate to a minor adjunct of spirits in a mixed drink, e.g., today added in near-homeopathic doses and shaken with gin and ice to make a Martini. To make matters worse, the engine of industrial winemaking floods our supermarkets with bottles of inexpensive, indifferently made vermouth that you do not want to put in your mouth (wines so boring that they should come packaged with an Adderall) and whose fate it is to languish in dusty, oxidized repose in liquor cabinets for months or years past their prime.
It wasn’t always so. Some of the very oldest traditions in winemaking are not in making natural wines, with nothing added to them, but wines with a good deal thrown in. Vermouth, a wine that is aromatized with herbs and spices, has a long and storied prehistory, dating back to the misty origins of wine: both Phoenician and ancient Egyptian winemakers infused their wines with botanicals, and the Greeks of antiquity, too, as documented by Hippocrates, would regularly add herbs, spices, and plant resins to their wines, particularly for their purported medicinal uses but not always. To be sure, the origins of vermouth qua Vermouth are much more recent, when the Turinese apothecary Antonio Carpano, likely riffing on the medieval German practice of aromatizing wines with Wermut (the German word for wormwood, a popular, bitter ingredient in Germany and elsewhere) named his proprietary wine “Vermouth.” Today, Italian and in particular Spanish drinkers guzzle a vast sea of vermouth prepared as a simple tall apéro, enjoyed in the early evening over ice, sometimes as a spritz with sparkling mineral water or inexpensive sparkling wine, much like Aperol. As I can testify, drinking good vermouth this way can be dangerous as it’s difficult to judge just how much you’ve consumed, while wanting still another.
Why is vermouth so damn refreshing? It has to do with the dynamic interplay of bitter, sweet, herbal, and floral, with the best wines of the category achieving an amplitude that is at once seductively obvious and also mysterious and compelling. Bitterness, in particular, is a flavor we’ve learned to avoid, but the bitter principle is central to the experience of many tonic potions and I feel, while lacking scientific research to back this up, that bitter-tasting things make you feel good, and certainly help after over-indulging in rich food, as generations of French will attest with their antidotes for la crise du foie.
This Wednesday we’re pouring five different ice-cold vermouths, one in the form of a vermouth snow cone, one as a mixed drink, one as a spritz, and two on the rocks (optional to add mineral water to these, too, if that is your preference). We’ll also have on offer several other lovely vermouths by the bottle at a ten percent discount.
- Primitivo Quiles “Vermouth P. Quiles” Alicante Spain
- Ser Vermouth 2018 Santa Cruz California
- Atxa Vermouth Rojo Basque Country Spain
- Bordiga Vermouth di Torino Rosso Turin Italy
- Buil & Giné “Natur Vermut” Priorat Spain
- BCN “Mut” Ambre Vermut Catalonia Spain (bottle only)
- Fred Jerbis “Cherry Barrel” Friuli Italy (bottle only)
- Vergano “Luli” Piemonte Italy (bottle only—nominally not a vermouth, but it’s Sofa King, so there’s that)