I can’t begin to express how annoyed I become whenever I hear a political pundit (or anyone else for that matter) describe America as “the greatest nation on earth.” It is not only patently untrue, it is indicative of a naïve lack of worldly experience that, for me, instantly undermines everything else that person opines upon thereafter.
That said, I am now going to make a similarly declaration. The Martini is the greatest cocktail on earth. When made with gin, of course. The reason that I open this beverage investigation by referencing a naïve nationalistic assertion, is because there’s only one other assertion that annoys me more – when some one calls any vodka-based drink a martini.
For some reason, mixologists have co-opted the name “martini” and applied it to all manner of cocktails that they pour into classic martini glasses. These drinks have absolutely no relationship to the original elixir of the gods. I reference the “razzmatini,” the “expresso martini” and, heaven forbid the “chocolate martini.” Calling these Martini's is like a bit like referring to a quartet of kazoos as an orchestra simply because they gave Beethoven’s Erocia symphony #3 a hum job. But I digress.
The Martini, in its current form is quite possibly the Platonic ideal of a cocktail. It is pristinely simple, deeply mysterious, perfectly balanced and definitively adult. The Martini celebrates alcohol, rather than masking it with mixers. The Martini employs two complementary beverages both built upon aromatic herbs in a way that balances elements that can be overwhelming on their own. This is a bit like factoring a quadratic equation, if one were to poetically compare mixology to mathematics. And I just did.
Vodka adds nothing to a cocktail. Let me repeat that for the vodka martini drinkers – vodka quite adds nothing! It is intentionally neutral, making it the perfect base for fruity cocktails wherein one wishes to consume alcohol without savoring it but masking it. So, appending the Martini name to “vodka martini” is an appropriate admission of inferiority for meddling with true originality. But sadly, I have encountered many bartenders who asked me “which vodka do you prefer” when I ordered a “Martini.” This response should result in the immediate revocation of their Bartenders Guide, followed by mild corporal punishment using a cocktail strainer.
The vodka martini is nearly devoid of the herbal “umami” that defines a real Martini. The bitter balance of wormwood flowers, cloves and cardamom from the vermouth, combined with, coriander, bitter citrus and juniper of the gin topped off with hint of briny olive essence is magically deep. Like perfume manufacturing, the perfect dry Martini is an exercise in balancing top notes, heart notes and bass notes. To replace the gin with vodka is to eviscerate the heart from the body.
However, the Martini did not begin as this perfect exercise in herbal subtlety. In it’s original form the Martini (originally called, “The Martinez”) was described in the first edition of The Bartenders Guide, as a full wine glass of sweet vermouth, one ounce of Old Tom Gin, with two dashes maraschino liqueur, a dash of bitters, shaken, and served with a twist of lemon. Herbal yes, but the Martinez was a veritable razzmatini of syrupy sweetness.
The generally accepted origin of the Martini is San Francisco around 1865. At the time, a cocktail named after the nearby town of Martinez was being served at the Occidental Hotel which was destroyed in the great 1906 earthquake. People drank at this hotel before taking the evening ferry across the bay to Martinez. Not surprisingly, the citizens of Martinez used this as evidence that the “Martini” was first concocted right there in Martinez.
Another left coast twist on this origin story claims that a bartender named Julio Richelieu first served the drink to a gold miner who was disappointed with the whisky Richelieu served. The miner purportedly placed a gold nugget on the bar and challenged Richelieu to create something delicious. He concocted a glass of gin, sweet vermouth, orange, bitters and a local olive.
Given the Martini’s sophisticated aura, New Yorkers also insist it was created there. The popular New York mythology claims that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel named Martini di Arma di Taggia invented it in 1911 for John D. Rockefeller. While this origin is extremely unlikely, it was indeed Rockefeller who helped the Martini make its way into big business lunches and backroom political deals. Franklin Roosevelt supposedly introduced the Martini to the 20th century’s most-famous drunken policy-maker, Sir Winston Churchill, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Regardless of origin, once the 20th century rolled around, the Martinez had dropped the sweetness of its youth and become the Martini. It had become transparent when then made from equal parts of gin and dry white vermouth with a couple of dashes of orange bitters. It was the Prohibition era and the relative abundance of illegal "bathtub" gin that led to the Martini's rise as the predominant cocktail of the mid 20th century. As refrigerators began to replace ice boxes, the drink became progressively dryer, with less vermouth being added.
Gin started to dominate the mix by 2:1, and the modern dry Martini was born. Sadly, by the mid-century, and the drink’s popularization by the Rat Pack, put an emphasis on this dryness that became an affectation of “sophistication" and the cocktail became nearly straight gin. It is not surprising that the Rat Pack perpetuated the notion of dry sophistication as there were already numerous witty references to the dryness of the martini in use in popular culture. For example, in the 1958 film Teacher's Pet, Clark Gable mixes a martini by turning the bottle of vermouth upside-down and then running the moistened cork around the rim of his martini glass before filling it with gin.
Such comical descriptions of ones preferred level of dryness abound. Surrealist director, Luis Buñuel, claimed that perfect dryness was achieved by allowing a ray of sunlight to pass through a bottle of vermouth and illuminate a glass of gin. And the unsurpassable Winston Churchill suggested that you pour gin into a Martini glass and then bow in the direction of France in homage to the origins of vermouth.
However, by virtually removing vermouth from the mix the “super dry” Martini is no longer either cocktail, nor interesting. When mixed in a ratio greater than 5:1 gin to vermouth, the cocktail becomes unbalanced, harsh and dominated by the juniper. The vermouth is a required element that reduces the boozy burn and takes the edge off of the juniper, while adding complex floral top notes to to the simple citrus elements common to gin.
