Who’s afraid of drinking vermouth?
I first tried vermouth in Spain. There, the day, slowed by the sluggish intensity of heat, is jolted into cool night by aperitivo hour. Vermouth is served over ice with a simple garnish of orange or lemon. The red liquid borders on viscous, giving it a sticky intensity that refreshes like nothing else. The journalist Helen Rosner describes drinking vermouth in the throbbing summer as “a thrilling exercise in fighting fire with fire”.
Vermouth is a wine aromatised by an apothecary’s shop of herbs and fortified with additional alcohol. I like mine with an olive – a saline hit that leaves a perfect teardrop of fat skimming across the surface. But vermouth never really found its footing in London. With just three specialised bars – in Soho, Kings Cross and Nunhead – it’s unlikely you’ll stumble across it.
Much like our summer, the promise of a British vermouth craze has been marked by many false starts. The drink seems destined to fall between the cracks, partly because of its innately ‘inbetweenish’ nature: stronger than wine, weaker than spirits; better known as an ingredient in cocktails than in its own right. Vermouth has a disorientating placelessness: who is it for?
In Italy I’m told the only people who order it are over fifty or Spanish tourists, although if the German pavilion afterparty at the Venice Biennale is anything to go by, it’s still popular in Dusseldorf. Perhaps the issue is tradition. Where Italians are bound by self-flagellating observance of the ‘right way,’ UK producers are exploiting the creative opportunities presented by vermouth.
Still Wild is a Pembrokeshire vermouth company with an ethos rooted in foraging salt swept botanicals. It makes a sweet and dry vermouth from local ingredients including bog myrtle, rock samphire and sweet woodruff. Its founder, James Harrison-Allen, told me he tried 73 plants and herbs before settling on the perfect blend. “We can embrace it as an essentially new product in this country,” he says. “Whereas Italy is very stuck into tradition and heritage, here you can take the framework of the movement and be far more creative with it”. Guy Abrahams, founder of the award winning London Vermouth Company, echoed these sentiments, saying the British vermouth market is “ripe for creativity”.
There are now dozens of UK producers making an often hyperlocal and varied spectrum of vermouths, some cloaked in the salty mists of the coast, others ripe with English gooseberries or replicating a hedgerow cosmos writ large.
Should you be ready to take the plunge, I would start by clearing out any accumulated dribs and drabs of syrupy vermouths that might be festering your liquor shelf. It’s time for a fresh start, a spring cleaning of prejudices.
Try bottles produced by Still Wild, Vault, London Vermouth Company, The Aperitivo! Co, and Sussex based In the Loop (a maker spearheading the move to get ‘English Vermouth’ a designated and protected term). Drink your vermouth with olives and pork scratchings and pickled onion monster munch and Spanish pintxos (a selection of salty, oily snacks like iridescent anchovies and wafer thin crisps). As the summer wears on and concrete begins to radiate, embrace the British aperitivo hour. Most importantly, it must always be cold. As Michael Kaplan, the encyclopaedic founder of Edinburgh-based Great British Vermouth, told me: it should be drunk like “an icepick in the back of the neck”.