The Martini Variations
Poetics, communication, and the personal when it comes to gin, vermouth, and bitters.
Miscommunication has been a general theme of my life this week. I am once again reminded of how much gets lost or confused in all of our disjointed texting—idle yapping and emoji-ing, oversharing and omitting. Let’s talk instead about something that seems straightforward and certain: the martini.
When you write about drinks for a living, the people in your life eventually ask you to teach them how to make a martini. Sometimes they ask you to show them a “real martini” or a “proper martini” or simply a “gin martini.” But it all means the same thing. Even though your nerdy drinks friends on social media spend a lot of time talking about Negroni variations, the normal people in your life never really ask about a Boulevardier or an Old Pal. Even if you’ve written about dozens, hundreds, of cocktails, your friends usually don’t want to hear about your favorite recipes for a Red Hook or a Greenpoint or a Bijou. And this is fine. You want the people close to you to be happy.
When someone asks me to show them how to make a martini, I know this is a way of saying “I appreciate you” or “I’d like to understand you better” or maybe it’s a way to avoid deeper conversations altogether. Often, they’d be just as happy drinking a sparkling rosé or a hard seltzer or a buttery chardonnay or a vodka iced tea or a bourbon on the rocks. But here I am, and here we are. So I mix them a martini.
The thing is, when you get down to it, a martini isn’t straightforward or certain at all. A martini so personal. I am only ever guessing at what someone else may like. I’ll start with a couple ounces of gin, and a healthy amount of dry vermouth (possibly an ounce or more), and a few dashes of orange bitters. I stir it with ice until it’s very cold.
As I stir, I remind them that this is only one way to make a martini. “If you don’t like it this way, I can make another, using less or more gin, or more or less vermouth, or a different gin or sweet vermouth…” Then I realize I’m being too solicitous, too overbearing, trying too hard. So I shut up and pour the martini into a chilled glass. I cut a lemon peel twist and squeeze it to express the oils and drop it into the drink. “We could also do olives if you’d rather…” I wait to see if it’s a wince or smile on the first sip. Do they like it or are they just being polite? It’s not an insignificant moment.
I’ve been making martinis since I was a teenager. I lived with my grandmother during summers at the Jersey Shore. She often drank a martini in the evening, sipping it as she listened to the Phillies game on the radio. Sometimes I mixed her martini, which she took very dry, always with Gordon’s gin and virtually no vermouth. I recall the same bottle of Cinzano in the bar, unrefrigerated, for the entirety of my adolescence. I’d mix it in her tall, glass martini pitcher, the one with an etching of a seagull. It was to be garnished with a minimum of six olives. With my grandmother’s martini, there was certainty.
Because it was so familiar—as so often goes in life—a martini didn’t strike me as anything special for a long time. When I was younger, I never understood the fuss over first “martini renaissance” in the late 1990s, which spawned the surprisingly persistent concept of the “martini bar.” I never got why, during the Sex and the City years, every terrible cocktail served in a V-shaped glass (Appletini, Chocolatini, et al.) needed the suffix “-tini.” I was bewildered by how much of the early 2000’s cocktail writing focused on the 19th century original story of The Martini.
More than a decade ago, I wrote columns insisting that the Manhattan was a superior cocktail to the martini (“more complex” and “more flavorful”). I was wrong. As I get older, I realize that a martini is clearly superior. I find myself making more of them these days, often in my grandmother’s martini pitcher with the etched seagull. Recently, I’ve decided I like them with more gin—more of the juniper bite—and less vermouth. Or maybe I’ve always liked them this way, but for whatever reason have always been trying something different.
I don’t exactly know what’s made me reconsider something as basic as the martini. Maybe it’s been seeing my sons and their friends “discover” the dry martini for themselves. Maybe I’m just finally willing to embrace some of life’s truths and certainties—even if it’s simply a 5:1 ratio of gin to vermouth.
I’ve often quoted H.L. Mencken’s famous assertion that the martini is “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet” and there’s certainly something poetic about it.
But by a certain age, trust me, too much poetry—frankly, too much talk, too much texting, too much communication in general—can be a recipe for disaster. Better just to focus on gin, vermouth, and bitters in the way you like it best.
The Recipes
Since the martini is so personal, why limit things to one basic recipe? You can make dozens of classic variations by simply switching the vermouth from dry to sweet, changing the gin from Londont Dry to Old Tom, or adding dashes of liqueurs such maraschino or Chartreuse. Do enough switching and suddenly you are quite far from a “martini.” What is your favorite variation?
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