Pity the poor martini.
For decades it was a staple of the sophisticated set. Guys like Don Draper would slam three or four of them down at lunch and then weave back to the office, ready to make decisions that would shape American life. John Vessenbacher—who is non-fictional; I bumped into him at the Monterey Cookhouse bar—remembers sipping them at Delmonico’s in New York back in the early ‘70s.
“It used to be my hangout,” he says.
The scene was old school, like the ‘50s only with bell bottoms. And the martinis were composed of gin and vermouth. Yes, vermouth—in a four-to-one ratio.
You see, for a cocktail to deserve the name it should contain at least three ingredients. The classic martini cocktail involved the juniper-laden spirit, some dry vermouth and a bit of produce—olives, lemon zest or perhaps a pearl onion (known as a Gibson). It wasn’t always thus, but from the time Ernest Hemingway slipped “They make me feel civilized” into A Farewell To Arms, to the days when polyester and disco threatened to demolish civilization, the ratio pretty much remained the same: four parts gin, one part vermouth.
OK, some preferred the “bone dry” version, but even that hovered around six-to-one. But that was then. What about now?
“For the most part people don’t want vermouth,” reports Alicia Aaron, a bartender at The Tap Room in Pebble Beach. “It’s just the alcohol and the olives.”
“I don’t put any in unless it’s specified,” adds Audrey Longway of Seventh & Dolores in Carmel. “People don’t drink it like that anymore.”
That appears to settles this week’s Burning Question. But what happened?
Well, two things: vodka and the 1980s. Oh—and James Bond, so three things.
In the... wait, I forgot about olive juice. Make that four things.
In the 1962 film Dr. No, Sean Connery succumbed to Madison Avenue product placement and demanded a faux martini of Smirnoff vodka, “shaken, not stirred.” By 1978, Smirnoff had grown into the nation’s largest spirits brand. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, vodka began erasing any traces of gin from the martini market. Last year, vodka sales amounted to 32 percent of the entire US liquor market.
“You ask people ‘gin or vodka’ and you get a funny look,” observes Heather Rupe of Monterey Cookhouse.
Not wanting to miss out on the vodka craze, hard liquor novices would request “dirty martinis,” diluting the drink with olive juice. It’s a flavor that obliterates the nuances of vermouth. With sensibilities thus numbed, people began referring to anything in a v-shaped cocktail glass as a martini.
Longtime bartenders still scrunch their faces when they speak of this era, telling tales fraught with pale green or bright pink horror. Fortunately, renewed interest in classic cocktails and crafted spirits over the last decade is reversing some of this damage. But vermouth is still lagging.
Of course, there were early signs of vermouth’s near demise. Winston Churchill so despised the fortified wine that he apparently preferred to dump gin in his glass and then glance at an untouched bottle of vermouth to complete the cocktail. Hemingway often ordered his as a “Montgomery,” at 15 parts gin to one part vermouth—the odds required, he said, for British hero General Montgomery to even risk an attack.
So we should have seen it coming.
But keep in mind that the second iteration of the martini (the first involved—gag—maraschino liqueur) was a whopping half vermouth the other half gin. And there are rumors that millennials are testing the old four-to-one, attracted by the growing craft gin options and the classic cocktail trend.
Hell, they brought the negroni back from extinction, millennials may be able to do the same with vermouth.
“I’m sure it will come back,” Rupe says hopefully. “It’s just an inevitable evolution.”
And as Aaron points out, vermouth never really went away. “We go through a lot of Manhattans,” she explains. The Pebble Beach steakhouse is a perfect setting for old fashioned cocktail like, well, the old fashioned. “That’s the other side of the story.”
So I will amend the answer to this week’s Burning Question to mostly no. But on the plus side, it’s becoming more and more subjective.
And that’s good news for the status of the martini. One day, it may reclaim its place among cocktails—drinks crafted from at least three ingredients.
Until then…
“Hey, I still call the martini a cocktail,” says Longway with a smile.