Here it is! Finally I figured it out.......
Sometimes, Respect Starts With a Pour Down the Drain
By Jason Wilson
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 21, 2007; F01
Jared Brown wants you be nicer to your vermouth.
He'd like you to stop making those tired jokes when you order your so-called dry martini. He'd rather you didn't quote Alfred Hitchcock's martini recipe, calling for "five parts gin and a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth," or Winston Churchill's, which calls for drinking a tumbler of gin while bowing in the direction of France. And he isn't amused when you ask the bartender to simply wave a bottle of vermouth over the shaker. In his opinion, the joke's on you, because you're not really drinking a martini anyway. You're drinking a cold glass of gin.
"Vermouth gets picked on, and it doesn't deserve to be," says Brown, cocktail scholar, consultant and co-author of "Shaken Not Stirred: A Celebration of the Martini." "Vermouth is the least-understood common beverage behind bars today."
Most of all, Brown wants you to take better care of your vermouth. Go to your liquor cabinet, fish out that ancient bottle and pour it down the drain. Now go buy a fresh bottle and, this time, keep it in the fridge. "I will die a happy man," says Brown, "if I leave this life having only succeeded in leading the world to the understanding that vermouth is a wine and, like port, spoils a month or two after opening." Spoiled vermouth tastes like, well, spoiled wine.
It's not only the home cocktail maker he's trying to convert. Brown, along with his partner and co-author Anistatia Miller, recently created a cocktail menu for the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, including a Reverse Manhattan that called for three parts sweet vermouth to one part bourbon. Arriving at the banquet room, they discovered that the bar was stocked with several already-opened, half-filled bottles of vermouth that, according to Brown, had been sitting there "since Carter banned the three-martini lunch." He sneaked into the hotel's supply room and found shelves loaded with more unsealed, half-used bottles -- all spoiled.
In a panic, Brown ran to the nearest liquor store and bought all the vermouth he could get his hands on. The bartenders, of course, thought he was nuts. But once the event began, they changed their tune. "Every time another person raved to the bartenders about the drinks, I shot them an I-told-you-so look," he says.
Brown is not alone in his vermouth evangelism. Over the past year, numerous food and beverage trendspotters have declared a sort of vermouth renaissance.
Though vermouth traditionally is one of the cheapest spirits available, ranging from $7 to $10 a bottle, several premium brands have edged into the market in recent years. A few years ago Quady Winery, in Madera, Calif., began selling its Vya sweet and dry vermouths at more than $20 a bottle. And some bartenders are using the hard-to-find Carpano Antica Formula, based on the original vermouth recipe from 18th-century Italy.
Whether a rise in vermouth represents a true or concocted trend is still open to debate. Jack Robertiello, an editor at Adams Beverage Group, which monitors the wine and spirits industry, is skeptical. His research shows that Italy's Martini & Rossi, the most popular brand of vermouth in the United States, imported about 550,000 cases in 2005 and has hovered there for years.
"If you asked a bartender, 'When's the last time someone ordered a glass of vermouth?,' they'd look at you like you were crazy," Robertiello says.
However, Laura Baddish, who represents the Martini & Rossi brand in the United States, claims that vermouth sales increased significantly in 2006, though she said numbers were not available. "Classic cocktail recipes are re-energizing the vermouth category," she says. The recent trend of high-end bourbon and rye whiskeys, for instance, has rekindled interest in the Manhattan, for which sweet vermouth is essential.
Brown backs up the enthusiasm. "It is a trend in its early stages," he says, explaining that the interest is being led by those "who want to restore bartending as a profession and an art."
Todd Thrasher, cocktail guru at Restaurant Eve and the PX lounge in Alexandria, makes his own vermouth by macerating 16 different herbs in wine. He also uses expensive Vya sweet vermouth in his Manhattan at PX. "I think vermouth is something that's misunderstood," he says. "The best way to learn about vermouth is to try it on the rocks to explore its nuances."
But Robertiello questions how many bartenders demonstrate such vermouth devotion. "I would bet that 99 out of 100 bartenders have never sat down and done a tasting of vermouths," he says.
Probably true. But as it happens, I have just returned from Italy, where I did participate in a tasting at the Martini & Rossi distillery in Pessione, near Turin. Though aromatized wines have been around since the ancient Greeks, Turin is the birthplace of vermouth as we know it. Antonio Benedetto Carpano first produced the spirit here in 1786; Alessandro Martini and Luigi Rossi introduced their version in 1863. Carpano was inspired by a German fortified wine that used wormwood. The word "vermouth" derives from "wermut," the German word for wormwood.
Talk of a vermouth trend in the United States was met with amusement by the Italians I talked to during Turin's evening aperitivo hour. In most Italian bars, vermouth sits right in the rail, next to the Campari and the spumante, and is poured dozens of times every evening, so storage is rarely an issue. Also, Italians generally drink vermouth by itself as an aperitif, on the rocks and perhaps with a citrus garnish.
At Martini & Rossi, I was led through the laboratory and into a stark white room by the production team. A man in a white lab coat poured glasses of extra dry, rosso, bianco and ros? vermouths. "If you ask young people in Italy what their favorite Martini is, they'll say bianco," says Luciano Boero, the head of production at the plant. "For older people like me, however, Martini Rosso is the most popular."
Vermouth is 75 percent wine, and all the wine for Martini & Rossi vermouth -- even the rosso -- is a basic white, such as Trebbiano. The wine provides only the structure and body. "To make a great vermouth, the wine must be neutral," says Alberto Oricco, an oenologist and quality-control supervisor at the plant. "It's important not to use a wine with a big flavor, because the flavor comes from the herbs."
The aromatic herbs that give Martini & Rossi vermouth its flavor are mixed secretly in a lab in Geneva. While Boero knows which herbs are used, and did admit to some ingredients, even he doesn't know the exact recipe. Besides the wine and botanicals, there is also alcohol, sugar, and -- in vermouth rosso -- caramel added for color.
Because we are sampling at room temperature, I can much more easily pick out aromas and flavors. As we taste the pale yellow extra dry, there is a scent of iris, lemon peels and raspberry, and a hint of sweet wine in the taste. "We use a little Marsala wine in this blend," Boero says.
We move on to the rosso, which is actually brown, and what we commonly call sweet vermouth. "Why is it called red? I don't know why," Boero says with a chuckle. Besides the interesting note of coriander, one of the most important ingredients is cinchona, a tree whose bark gives sweet vermouth a bitter kick. "We never use spicy herbs," Boero says, "only mountain herbs."
The 10 minutes I've spent tasting Martini Rosso is easily the most time I've ever spent thinking about sweet vermouth. It's usually just something I pour into a shaker, with bourbon, for a Manhattan.
"Vermouths were not originally created for being mixed. They were created to drink alone," says Cristiana Fanciotto, Martini & Rossi's spokeswoman. "I don't think Luigi Rossi ever thought to create Martini Rosso so that it could be mixed with other liquors. He'd already created the perfect mix. There was no need to mix it with anything else."
For me, the most impressive vermouth is the bianco -- another sweet vermouth -- which is available in the States but little known. The scent of thyme and oregano and the tastes of cloves and vanilla create a wonderful balance of sweet and savory. I could drink bianco vermouth on the rocks, with a twist of lemon, all afternoon. To me, it is no wonder that bianco is the most popular vermouth in Italy, accounting for half of Martini & Rossi's production.
Back home, of course, who cares how the Italians do it? Now that I better appreciate the spirit's complex flavors, I've begun experimenting with it to create new drink variations. Try using more dry vermouth in your classic martini. Add more sweet vermouth to your Manhattan -- or replace the standard rosso vermouth with bianco.
"Vermouth has such an undeserved reputation," says Brown. "We just want the truth to be known."
Jason Wilson is The Post's new Spirits columnist.
