Boozehound - Jason Wilson [16]
As silly as the faux speakeasy can be, we must credit the classic cocktail movement with numerous major advancements. A prime example: creating a backlash against the Very Dry Martini. Is there any cocktail that invites more bloviation than the Very Dry Martini? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know how you take your martini, gramps: no vermouth. I should just whisper the word vermouth while I mix it, right? I should simply wave a capped bottle of vermouth over the shaker? Never heard that one before! You’d rather just drink this tumbler of gin and bow in the direction of France? Yes, sir! You are correct, sir! Ugh. The joke’s on you, because you’re not really drinking a martini anyway. You’re just drinking a cold glass of gin.
There was a lot of talk early in the Obama administration that the era of American Exceptionalism was coming to a close. If that ends up being the case, I sincerely hope the post–World War II era dry martini goes away with it. The Greatest Generation may have been great for many reasons. But can we finally, at long last, be honest about one crucial thing? Their taste in martinis is awful.
I’ve had a number of discussions about the martini with cocktail historian David Wondrich, the amazingly bearded drinks columnist for Esquire and the high priest of the classic cocktail movement. Wondrich’s bearing in the world is that of a benevolent wizard, and few know more about the social history of drinking. His history of early American cocktails, Imbibe!, published in 2008, is perhaps the best book on drinks ever written. I count him as a guru, and I sometimes consult him on issues like this. He, unsurprisingly, takes a dim view on the midcentury Very Dry Martini. “That generation was really aggressive at working the macho angle,” he says. “People were afraid to say that they liked vermouth in their drink.” Thus, the rise of martinis with a gin-to-vermouth ratio ranging from 7:1 all the way up to 15:1.
Of course, if you look at mid-twentieth-century luminaries who championed a nearly vermouthless martini—such as Hemingway, Churchill, and Bogart—a certain truth emerges. Robert Hess, another classic cocktail apostle who blogs at the popular DrinkBoy.com, has called it like it is: “The authors of many of these convoluted methodologies were borderline, if not full-blown alcoholics … They knew exactly how to best increase the amount of personal alcohol consumption.” Hess published this revelation in a scholarly journal called Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail. (Yes, this is a real publication. I told you we’ve entered hard-core geekdom here!)
Bernard De Voto (the crotchety midcentury Harper’s columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner) declared a dry martini the “supreme American gift to world culture.” But De Voto also made a lot of other silly declarations, including the idea that there “are only two cocktails”—a dry martini and “a slug of whiskey”—and that the Manhattan was “an offense against piety” and that any man who drinks one has “no spiritual dignity.” Well, at least no one reads De Voto anymore.
Come to think of it, in nearly every other realm of arts and culture, the grumpy old white male has been excised from the canon, except when it comes to the Very Dry Martini. I still get emails from readers who suggest that vermouth is the handiwork of the devil. Well, I say we’ve been bullied far too long by conservative martini drinkers