vermouth is a class of aromatized, fortified aperitif wine with particularly close ties to cocktail culture. “Aromatized” means the wine has been infused with botanicals for flavor and color, and the flavor of vermouth is principally defined by these herbs and spices, not the base wine. “Fortified” means the wine contains added distilled alcohol—usually some sort of grape brandy—and this component can serve multiple purposes, including arresting wine fermentation to preserve sweetness and fresh-fruit flavors, extracting flavors from botanicals, and improving shelf stability. See mistelle. “Aperitif” indicates a bittersweet, gastric-stimulating, appetite-enhancing character, largely stemming from the aromatization botanicals—wormwood, in particular, for which vermouth is named and which should play an essential, if nuanced, role in any genuine vermouth. See aperitif and digestive and wormwood.
Modern vermouth is traditionally assembled from white wine, wormwood (Artemisia absinthium and/or Artemisia pontica), and some combination of herbs, spices, flowers, roots, sugar, and alcohol. Vermouths can also be flavored, such as Italian red vermouths with added vanilla, quinine, or bitters, a Turinese tradition (originally as vermouth alla vaniglia) that survives today. Regulations in the European Union and United States add legal form and weight to some of these attributes, but these regulations are recent and selective in scope.
The modern form of vermouth emerged in the eighteenth century in Piemonte and Savoy—then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and today parts of Italy and France. With the botanically rich foothills of the Alps, wine-producing regions, wealth, and access to Ligurian ports and the spice trade, the area bears many attributes that contributed to the formation of vermouth. The direct antecedents of modern vermouth were Wermut, vermut, or vermutte of Hungarian and German origin (wormwood wines); regional wine infusions; wines flavored with distilled botanicals; and spiced wines enjoyed by European aristocracy. Modern vermouth inherits aspects of each.
Vermouth was nominally commercialized in the late 1700s in Torino. A young employee of the Turinese Liquoreria Marendazzo, Antonio Benedetto Carpano (1764–1815), is typically credited with this, although historical verification is problematic. In any case, Carpano’s template for the drink was sufficiently refined to become a local favorite. (The vermouth brand named for Carpano that is familiar today appears to have been created some decades later.) Various imitators arose in the early 1800s, including Cinzano and Cora, but these Turinese vermouths remained strictly regional products until the 1830s, when records show vermouths were exported to New World communities with a large Italian population, including Buenos Aires, New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York.
Noilly Prat. Their evolved product was lighter-bodied than Torino vermouth and contained less sugar. More critically, it was built upon Herault wines deliberately oxidized through seaside barrel aging in the Camargue, a practice that dramatically affected the flavor of the product. Marseilles remained the center of both their business and their product’s culture for many years—their vermouth became at least as important for cooking as drinking in Provençal cuisine—and spawned local imitators (e.g., Chappaz), very few of which survive today.Between the late 1830s to the early 1860s, regional wars and political instability inhibited the export of vermouth, although producers like Noilly Prat, Cinzano, and Cora flourished nevertheless. In 1863, the manufacturer Martini, Sola & Cia was established outside Torino (with direct railway access to Piedmontese agricultural regions and the port at Genoa) with the aim of mass-producing vermouth and other wines for export markets; production commenced around 1868. By 1879, the firm had been renamed Martini & Rossi and was on its way to becoming a global market leader in vermouth by volume, a distinction it has held ever since. See Martini & Rossi. More or less concurrently, Noilly Prat also achieved export scale from its base in Marseillan and began shipping to many of the same foreign markets as Martini, eventually achieving a lasting market leadership of their own. For both companies, the Americas were a market capable of fueling enormous growth, with enough residual opportunities to keep many smaller brands busy.
By the 1870s, enough vermouth was reaching American markets to elevate it above an ethnic specialty and into the mainstream. In the United States, vermouth encountered the ascendant cocktail culture and proved such an intriguing and adaptable mixed-drink ingredient that it permanently changed mixology. The United States has remained the single largest vermouth market in the world, the demand driven entirely by cocktails. Italian vermouths also enjoyed extensive popularity as a standalone aperitif in South America and greater Europe.
During this time, it became common to refer to vermouth styles as “Italian” or “French.” As proprietary products with complex, secret recipes, there was little to immediately differentiate these products from each other but the brand names, which could be transient, and the countries of origin on the labels, which were less so. Rising demand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—especially the ascendant popularity of dry vermouth in cocktails—drove many producers to diversify their products into multiple styles. French vermouth producers started offering Torino-style vermouths, and Italian producers such as Martini & Rossi added interpretations of the drier style that Noilly initiated.
Inspired by the relatively obscure, lightly sweet blanc style that had emerged in Chambéry, on the French side of the Savoy Alps, in the late nineteenth century, Italian producers also began offering a new bianco (white) style. As product lines diversified, caramel or black walnut coloring agents were adopted for some products, and additional labeling terminology emerged, with “rosso,” “rouge,” “bianco,” “blanc,” and “dry” appearing on labels. In the United States, where the white style never caught on, “sweet” (for Italian) and “dry” (for French) also became common parlance. Disruption from the world wars combined with the industrial boom in the United States led to major development of American vermouth production. By the late 1940s, New York Harbor–based Vermouth Industries of America and their Tribuno brand were second only to Martini & Rossi in US market share, although they competed on price, not quality. Gallo, in California, also did a large business in cheaper domestic vermouth during the mid-twentieth century.
Martini. As enthusiasm gave way to obsession, the use of vermouth became associated with dilution (cheapness) and off flavors (contamination) in the drink, and vermouth became something to be minimized. Opportunistic vermouth producers responded by making milder dry vermouths and rendering them colorless via aggressive filtration (so that more could be used, and hence sold, without it showing in the color of the drink), and the demand proved a boon to some Chambéry-based producers, who already offered dry vermouths without the distinctive oxidative character of Noilly Prat. In the early 1960s, Noilly Prat developed a lighter formula to sell exclusively to the US market; this lighter formula remains as Noilly Prat Extra Dry (as opposed to Noilly Prat Original Dry) and may no longer be exclusive to the United States.Interest in vermouth faded out in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the wine stagnated in a soft global market for three decades. Starting in the 1990s, the cocktail renaissance rekindled interest in vermouth, eventually leading to a renewal of the category. The harbinger was Carpano’s introduction of Antica Formula in 2001, a radically richer, vanilla-flavored red vermouth based on an old recipe and marketed as a premium offering. This new vermouth was a revelation to many bartenders, and expectations were rewritten across the board. The subsequent decade saw an accelerated growth of new premium vermouths and upgraded older ones from Italy, France, and elsewhere. The same interest and global marketplace have also dramatically elevated similar wine styles such as quinquina and americano, which, except for Dubonnet, had largely remained regional specialties. Another regional tradition, Spanish vermouth, which dates to at least the late nineteenth century and is heavily influenced by local wine practices (solera aging, for example) also emerged internationally. Boutique winemakers in the United States introduced a second wave of domestic vermouths, although this time, theirs have been consistently high-end offerings, and most are sufficiently idiosyncratic to no longer be recognizable as vermouth, despite their labeling.
Buglass, Alan J. Handbook of Alcoholic Beverages. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2011.
Monti, François. El gran libro del vermut. Barcelona: Ediciones B, S. A., 2015.
Strucchi, Arnaldo. Il vermouth Di Torino. Casale Monferrato, Italy: C. Cassone, 1907.
By: Martin Doudoroff
September, 1869: Vermouth meets the cocktail, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Wondrich Collection.
September, 1869: Vermouth meets the cocktail, Knoxville, Tennessee. Source: Wondrich Collection.