Vermouth – History of

First installment in an occasional series.

Vermouth intrigues me – it’s at the intersection where wine and spirits meet, yielding iconic cocktails. Perhaps it’s my culinary backgound which leads me to find the aromas and flavors so unusual and captivating or my archaeological bent is engaged by the ancient practice of flavoring wine. As the craft cocktail movement expands and becomes more prevalent, appreciation for vermouth grows, both as a blending component and as a stand-alone aperitif. Against this background, I decided to write about vermouth, its history, its use in cocktails and the growing movement of artisanally produced vermouths. This first installment is basically ” back to school” – I’ll trace the origins of vermouth and its subsequent development.

Vermouth is essentially aromatized and fortified wine; aromatized by the infusion of botanicals – herbs, roots and the like – and fortified by the addition of alcohol. The practice can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Roman who flavored their wines with an assortment of odd ingredients including wormwood, designed to make  wines more palatable and salubrious. Vermouth, as we now know it,  began being produced in the Piedmont region of Italy during the 16th century. This wine was modeled on a Bavarian wine, ”Wermuthwein”, “wermuth”  being German for wormwood. Wormwood is thought to cure gastric ills and vermouth was touted as a medicinal wine. In addition to wormwood, other botanicals were also added.

Production became more commercialized in the 18th century when Signor Carpano of Turin introduced “Punt e Mes”, a sweet red infused wine still made to this day. Across the border in Savoie, which had been part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, a drier, i.e. less sweet, and golden version of vermouth was produced. This distiction continues to this day – sweet red vermouth is known as Italian  and dry white vermouth is known as French.

With the dawn of the cocktail age in the early 20th century and the use of vermouth as a blending component, all medicinal considerations were tossed aside; botanicals were replaced by concentrates which were cheap and reliable and production industrialized. Centers of production also shifted; in Italy from the north to Apulia and Sicily and in France from Savoie to Languedoc and Roussillon. It has been somewhat coyly asserted that the centers of vermouth production are areas of poor wine production. To some extent, this is accurate. Both the wine and spirit for vermouth come from the European wine lake, that reservoir of poor quality, unmarketable wine. However, not all vermouth is industrial. Some production  remained low key and now, artisanal vermouth has appeared, a logical step in the continuing search for quality in our gastronomic lives.

Next time, the quality revolution.

My sources for this post were –

                                                                 The Oxford Companion to Wine, ed. Jancis Robinson

                                                                 The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, ed. Tom Stevenson

                                                                  Hugh Johnson’s The Story of Wine