A Vermouth Life

You have to accept that the geography of wine is bound to change pretty dramatically. In two weeks I shall be in Provence where my host has endured yet another scorching summer with temperatures frequently well over 40 degrees, no rain, tiny yields and grapes that will produce prodigious levels of alcohol, causing epic headaches for anyone drinking more than a couple of glasses. Unless local growers can adapt their viticulture, they will have to hang up their secateurs.

In Brittany in July, I was presented with a glass of red wine blind and asked to identify it. I was stumped. It was clearly around 15 degrees and tasted sweet. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It turned out to be a Graves, but quite unlike any Graves I had drunk before. Its alcoholic strength and Merlot-induced sweetness was a world away from the elegant clarets of my youth, which were generally under 12 degrees even in a hot year. My children may well live long enough to see ripe Cabernet Sauvignon hanging from vines in the Pentland Hills but by that time Bordeaux will have either had to rethink the way it makes its wines, or turn production over to making fortified wines like port.

In the circumstances I could hardly feign surprise when I heard that Bolney Estate in Sussex was making ‘Rosso’ – an English vermouth from its red wine and flavouring it with local herbs and wormwood, and very creditable it is too.

It is wormwood that gives us the word ‘vermouth’, a corruption of the German ‘Wermut’ traditionally used to flavour German wine. Lots of wines were flavoured, generally to counteract stale, oxidised tastes in the days before they could be kept relatively fresh in bottle. Vermouth was born in the eighteenth century when herbs and spices were added to fortified or cooked wines. With time, vermouth’s palate was enlarged to include a whole collection of herbs, fruit peel, quinine and spices, and the basic brew was made from a blend of cooked and natural wines: either white or red, sweet or dry.

The first time I came across vermouth was at the venerable L’Escargot in Greek Street in Soho, where it was the house aperitif. When you went to dinner there in the old days (I was a little boy when I first ate there), you stopped at a bar opposite the door and they handed you a glass of Dolin vermouth from Chambéry in the French Alps. Many years later when I was teaching people about wine in the skiing resort of Les Gets, we tracked down some bottles of Dolin, which was as good as I recalled.

The most popular aperitif in my college was not sherry – as it was elsewhere – but ‘gin and French’. I don’t remember which vermouth we used now. Gin and French, was gin with ‘dry’ white vermouth (it was probably far from dry and possibly Italian) as opposed to sweet red, Italian vermouth, which made ‘gin and Italian’ or ‘gin and It’. Another variant was gin and mixed: half French, half-It. What we really liked most was the price. A measure of gin was 18p then and the vermouth 2p more; but you were allowed to fill the glass up to the brim, so in the end a 20p gin and French or Italian was excellent value. A couple of years ago when I returned to my college for a memorial service, I tried to get the chap in the buttery to make me one. I ended up with a very nasty, warm dry martini which cost over a fiver.

When I lived in Paris I used to go down to Bordeaux to work in the archives in the rue d’Aviau. When the day was done I was on the lookout for Kina Lillet, a vermouth originally made with the sweet wines from the southern Graves, Sauternes, Barsac, Loupiac and St Croix du Mont. It was served with a slice of orange in the local restaurants and bars. It has become more popular now (the quinine count is a lot lower) and is imported into Britain by Pernod-Ricard. The reference to quinine (‘Kina’) has been expunged from the label.

If I were to have a bottle of vermouth permanently installed in the door of my fridge, I think I would opt for Noilly Prat. Noilly is a good, all singing-all dancing vermouth, aromatic enough to enhance a dry Martini, excellent on its own with ice and a slice of lemon and wonderful for deglazing fish. I have been down to their cellars in the lovely coastal town of Marseillan on the Lac de Thau twice, drunk Noilly with local oysters and played pétoncle with the head man. The source for the wine used in its manufacture are the Picpoul grapes that grow on the sleek hills that rise from the lake and despite the Alpine origins of vermouth, Noilly Prat now gives the impression of being an indelible part of the landscape.

Noilly makes a fine, spicy red too, but I’ll be keeping the Bolney Rosso on hand for my next negroni.