It may be viewed as an old-fashioned aperitif—perhaps the most old-fashioned in the bartenders’ canon—but a modern trend for classic drinks has made vermouth the hottest item in the cocktail cabinet this year
For years relegated to the status of an oddity at the back of the cocktail cabinet, vermouth is back in the drinks spotlight and, according to many analysts, is the fastest-growing category on the wine and spirits shelf.
Worth $11.5 billion in 2022, the global market for the fortified wine—which has evolved over centuries from medicinal tonic to aperitif before finding new life as an essential cocktail ingredient—is set to more than double in value as a category before the decade is out.
Once strictly red or white, vermouth now comes in subtly amber-colored expressions, which serve a different set of taste buds. And the industrial giants who dominate the market are increasingly being challenged by artisanal competitors, who are exciting mixologists with their unique blends of locally foraged herbs and spices.
So, why has vermouth endured? Blame it on James Bond, who put white vermouth on the map in his martini, and the revival of the negroni, which has succeeded it as the world’s favorite drink, driving growth with the sweeter red.
Spiros Malandrakis, who follows liquor trends worldwide as head of global research in alcoholic drinks for market analysts Euromonitor, believes that nostalgia is at play and driving demand for vermouth of all shades. “People have always wanted to drink what their grandparents drank. Today, that’s classic cocktails—and wherever you have cocktails, there’s vermouth.”
The owners of New York’s Little City Vermouth brand would agree. Its drinks are “inspired by old-world tradition” and made using a mighty 53 different botanicals.
Millennials are increasingly taking their vermouth neat, bringing it back full circle to its medicinal origins. It was the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties in China who first fortified wine with herbs and roots, and the ancient Greeks who infused it with the wormwood from which vermouth gets its name—wermut is the German word for wormwood.
Hippocrates is said to have prescribed it to his patients as a pick-me-up. Centuries later, the Italians and French tweaked the ingredients to produce more refined pours, though the sip-alone trend diminished as the cocktail era dawned, creating a whole new set of opportunities for the flavor-rich aperitif.
The process of making its vermouth is a closely guarded secret, but a sense of the alchemy involved can be felt at the Noilly Prat distillery in Marseillan in the south of France. Here, the descendants of herbalist Joseph Noilly, who invented a pale dry version to please French palates, started producing its white vermouth in 1859. The mistelle—the mature distillation of Muscat grapes to which young wine infused with herbs and spices is added to create new vermouth—is kept in huge casks in a vast hall, which visitors can enter by appointment.
Pass through the courtyard beyond the hall, where dozens of barrels of Picpoul grapes—Noilly’s favorite local varietal as the base for its vermouth—are gently oxidizing in their year-long herbal bath, and you enter the darkened chais (an above-ground storage building for wine) where the real magic takes place. Here, there are sacks of flavorings to supplement the artemisia (a more romantic name for wormwood), including nutmeg, lavender, chamomile, bitter orange, and even cacao, as well as gentian and vanilla.
The haul, drawn from all over the world, as well as the fragrant wild garrigue of southern France, has grown incrementally as Noilly itself has expanded from being a producer of white vermouth only. In 1950, it added the red vital for whiskey-based cocktails such as the Manhattan and the Rob Roy, as well as negronis, and in the 1980s an amber with vanilla top notes catering specifically to French tastes.
People have always wanted to drink what their grandparents drank. Today, that’s classic cocktails—and wherever you have cocktails, there’s vermouth—Spiros Malandrakis
Bond and other famous martini-lovers who served as unpaid brand ambassadors are honored in the distillery archive, alongside Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who granted Noilly Prat a royal warrant in 1959.
Although dry white vermouth is an essential ingredient to this quintessential mid-century cocktail, the martini nearly killed the drink off as aficionados called for drier and drier versions. The one part of vermouth to two of gin in the authentic 1922 recipe diminished to just one to five over the next 30 years, and British prime minister Winston Churchill suggested that none was needed at all.
Artisanal distilleries are not generally set up for journeys of consumer discovery, but a glimpse into making vermouth can be had at Sacred, where sacks of herbs sit ready to be macerated in the plant behind the bottle shop on the Highgate site in north London. Owner Ian Hart, who grew up in the area, explains there’s no correlation between color and taste—while Noilly’s whites are delicate and refreshing drunk alone, Sacred’s own white, voted best extra-dry vermouth in the World Drinks Awards 2019, is a super-strong drop.
Its amber drinks better alone, but was specifically invented to recreate Bond creator Ian Fleming’s famous Vesper martini at Duke’s bar in London’s Mayfair district: “The Kina Lillet [liqueur] originally specified has now been discontinued, but Ian had some old bottles he was able to reverse-engineer,” explains Hart’s partner, Hilary Whitney.
Sacred is not alone among U.K. producers in winning awards; the London Vermouth Company’s own No. 1 Amber Limon has, like the elderflower, cardamom, and coriander-scented Dry, taken silver at the International Wine and Spirits Competition. “We were the first U.K. producers to win two silvers in the same year,” says founder Guy Abrahams. Artisanal competitors in Spain and New Zealand did even better, with coveted double golds, and Cinzano shone among the industrial giants with four different expressions.
Now driving the growth of vermouth is the increasing trend towards low and no-alcohol drinks, particularly among younger, more health-conscious consumers. “Vermouth not only offers less alcohol than spirits but is being made in alcohol-free versions, too,” reports William Campbell-Rowntree, head bartender at London’s latest five-star watering hole, Raffles at The OWO.
Vermouth not only offers less alcohol than spirits but is being made in alcohol-free versions, too—William Campbell-Rowntree
Defined at an ABV of 16-18 percent, less than half the alcohol of a typical spirit, vermouth has become the more abstemious drinker’s friend. “The rich flavors drink more slowly than wine, and it’s not as strong as a spirit, so can be drunk in larger quantities,” says Abrahams, who enjoys a drop of his own Dry at lunchtime, “moving on to the Amber Limon as a sundowner or the Red to sip by the fireside later in the evening.”
In taking his vermouth neat, as he says a growing number of his customers who originally bought it for mixing in cocktails are doing, Abrahams is emulating the diners and partygoers of Madrid, who quaff their beloved vermut daily by the tumbler as the ultimate preprandial. As the trend towards less potent drinks grows while cocktails remain popular, it can only mean that vermouth will stay out of the cocktail cabinet and move to the refrigerator—the only place an open bottle belongs—for as long as it lasts.
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