Vermouth Serves Cocktails Upside-Down

Vermouth is always about to have its moment. (Note: I mean in the U.S., as really civilized places like Barcelona and Milan would be shaking their cool collective heads at that first sentence.) Just check major papers, and every five years or so their lifestyle pages will have an “Artisanal Vermouth Emerges as an Aperitif” story.

To make a vermouth, you start with white wine, fortify it with a spirit, and then the fun begins. It’s time to start adding botanicals, from wormwood (whence vermouth gets its name from German) to, if you’re making a local vermouth, hummingbird sage. You probably won’t stop until you get to a dozen or more.

At least that’s what T.W. Hollister & Co. has done with their just-released vermouths out of Carpinteria, both called Oso de Oro. A three-headed creative team has brought these lovely products to life: The Hollister is Kyle Hollister—yes, of the famous local family—but then there’s his longtime friend (they were born on the same day in Cottage Hospital) Jesse Smith, helping with the local agricultural knowledge. Add to them wine and vermouth maker Carl Sutton, who mostly made his name in San Francisco, and you get a wealth of wisdom to create new spirits. For instance, that headline I mentioned above was from a 2010 New York Times story featuring Sutton.

To highlight their just-released dry and sweet vermouths, I turned to something old that’s definitely worth being new again: variations on the two kings of the cocktail—the martini and the Manhattan. Of course, these are generally known to star gin (please, please not vodka—that’s just a vodka cocktail) and rye or bourbon, respectively. But historically (pre- Prohibition, that is), both featured a ratio of more vermouth than the boozier co-ingredient.

The cocktails done this way, vermouth heavy, are often called upside-down or reverse, for obvious reasons.

The obvious reasons people gave up on drinking the drinks this way—jokes about dry, vermouth-less martinis made many a New Yorker cartoonists’ career back in the day—are led by America’s greater and greater need to get kicked upside the head to feel we’re enjoying something. We are not a subtle nation by nature, and that’s even before we ended up with our current oaf of a president. But it’s also because vermouths got worse and worse as they became mass market, while gin and rye got better and better post-Prohibition bathtub versions. To top it off, people hung on to bottles of vermouth for years in a liquor cabinet, where they went bad. I mean, you don’t open a bottle of wine and drink it for months, do you? At the least, you’d get it in a refrigerator. So get that opened vermouth fridged up fast.

But how delicious they are, so many wonderful different waves of flavors from all those botanicals, 12 in the dry, 19 in the sweet! The stronger spirits sort of give them one extrafortified push in your glass, just the way a splash of water actually makes your single-malt whiskey taste better. You need to unlock each liquor’s code. I’d swear the dry vermouth in the Vermouth Over Martini even hints at baking spice. Perhaps that’s one reason they were beloved by none other than Julia Child? Hence, one more Santa Barbara link to these products, and one more selling point for upside-down drinks— vermouth has less alcohol, so these variations keep you from getting schnockered. Both the sweet (blood orange) and the dry (orange) highlight citrus a tad more than other designer vermouths do, but that’s also fitting given our location and what grows so well here.

Speaking of things growing here, especially those that plop perfectly into a Manhattan, it’s time to make some cherries to last you for a year of cocktails (they go in Aviations, too, and you can always top a really adult sundae with them). While the window for cherries is sadly quick, you can preserve them by following the recipe below. These are so much better than those bright red glowing things most stores sell.

“We’re looking for people making more heavy-handed pours,” Jesse Smith has said about Oso de Oro. “We don’t want it left on the back of a bar for special occasions.” These two drinks take the Hollister gang at their word.

by George Yatchisin