Boozehound - Jason Wilson [49]
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “This is what my family’s always taken after dinner.”
About ninety minutes west of Milan by train or car, Torino, the birthplace of vermouth, flaunts an age-old happy hour scene. It’s a bit of a murky history, but either Giovanni and Carlo Cinzano created the first vermouth here in 1757, or Antonio Benedetto Carpano first produced the fortified wine in 1786. Either way, vermouth was inspired by a German fortified wine that used wormwood. The word vermouth derives from wermut, the German word for wormwood. Carpano was soon followed into the vermouth business by Alessandro Martini and Luigi Rossi in 1863.
Though most people have heard of these historic brands, they are not the only vermouths to be found in Torino. In the nineteenth century, nearly every major café in Torino produced its own vermouth, and some of these formulas exist to this day. I visited the small but stately century-old Caffè Mulassano on the Piazza Castello, with its lovely marble bar. Caffè Mulassano claims it was the favored gathering place of the Royal House of Savoy. The white-jacketed waiters still serve the bar’s own sweet vermouth—a recipe dating back to 1879—a red, bitter house liqueur called Liquore delle Alpi, which looks and tastes like Campari. I took my Mulassano vermouth on the rocks, per tradition in Torino, and enjoyed a complimentary plate of little panini and tramezzini sandwiches and olives.
After Mulassano, I walked a few blocks on sidewalks covered by ornate porticos to the grandest of Torino’s historic cafés, the San Carlo, which opened in 1822. I entered between its gilded pilasters and under the huge, glitzy chandelier, and the tuxedoed bartender mixed me an Americano. A local guy was also sipping an Americano, while his dog slept at his feet. He told me I should check out Eataly, a new food emporium situated in the old Carpano vermouth distillery near the edge of the city. Apparently, one of the hippest new spots in Torino happened to be the supermarket. On the top floor, a museum celebrates Carpano vermouth and Punt e Mes, a vermouth to which a little bit of a Camparilike bitter is added (the name means “point and a half” in Piemontese—a point of sweetness, plus a half point of bitterness, supposedly named for a favorable rise in the stock market that benefited Carpano).
“Not many Americans like vermouth, do they?” he said. “They only put a little eyedropper in their dry martinis, yes?”
Actually, I told him, some people in the United States were finally beginning, slowly, to appreciate vermouth. “It’s a bit of a trend.”
“Vermouth is trendy? Ha!” he said. This, of course, was amusing to someone living in Torino, especially during happy hour, when most everyone had vermouth in their glasses.
“The biggest issue,” I said, “is that people don’t realize they need to refrigerate it and treat it like a wine.” The man just smiled and shook his head. In most Italian bars, vermouth is poured dozens of times every evening, so storage is rarely an issue.
Given that vermouth is so entwined with Italy’s happy hour scene, a vermouth pilgrimage seemed like a must. The next day, I traveled twenty minutes to the town of Pessione, where I visited the Martini distillery, housed in a sprawling whitewashed eighteenth-century villa. A greeter led me through the gate and the garden and into a stark white laboratory where a man in a white lab coat poured glasses of extra-dry, rosso, bianco, and rosé vermouths. For more than a century, until late 2010, Martini was better known in the United States under the name Martini & Rossi. The reason, of course, had been the inevitable confusion between the Martini brand and the American cocktail of the same name. Whether Americans will be any less confused remains to be seen. But in Italy, if you order a “Martini” you will receive a glass of bianco vermouth on the rocks.
“If you ask young people in Italy what their favorite Martini is, they