The Martini , with gin or (much later) vodka cut with vermouth in ever-shifting proportions, is the iconic cocktail, the one that stands for all of its tribe, whether to take the blame or receive the credit; whether it’s the evils of the three-Martini lunch or the delight of getting out of those wet clothes and into a Dry Martini. No other mixed drink, with the possible exception of punch, has inspired so many poems, so much prose, such a plethora of jokes and witticisms and iconic images. See punch.
The precise origin of the Martini has long been sought; indeed, it is one of the holy grails of cocktail history. Theories abound, some of them presented in intricate detail, yet as of this writing none has proved conclusive, and most are easily disproved. That includes the most hallowed of them, which has the drink invented in Martinez, California, for a thirsty miner on his way to San Francisco from gold country (“Martinez” is one of the early names for the drink). Unfortunately, the person who transmitted the story, John “Toddy” Briones (1874–1967), was an infant at the time the invention supposedly took place, and there is no record of the man it was attributed to.
We shall stick to the known facts. The first mentions of a cocktail combining gin and vermouth come from 1883, in a pair of newspaper articles from Cleveland and Chicago, but in both cases it is identified as a Manhattan cocktail (this is not as strange as it seems today: the graininess and richness of genever, the prevailing style of gin in America, make it easy to mistake for whisky when mixed with something as aromatic as vermouth). See
Faced with this level of confusion, the best one can do is stand back and attempt to discern a pattern. One conclusion emerges: whoever invented it, the practice of lightening a whisky or gin cocktail with vermouth (or, conversely, fortifying a vermouth cocktail with gin or whisky) came to public attention through its association with New York City’s clubland, the loose association of the prosperous and the prominent that socialized in the city’s exclusive clubs and hotel bars, with the whisky version followed by the gin one. We may never know the precise details, but with prominent clubmen Frank and Randolph Martine, the Manhattan Club (home of the Manhattan Cocktail), and the Turf Club all tied up in the drink’s early history, it is the best explanation we have (there are other links to that milieu space forbids us from considering).
At any rate, if the 1880s was the decade of the Manhattan, the 1890s went to its close sibling the Martini. That of course was the name that finally won out, helped no doubt by the dominant position of in the American market of Martini & Sola’s (and later Martini & Rossi’s) vermouth, which accounted for two out of three bottles of Italian vermouth sold. This mixture of Old Tom gin and vermouth could not, however, completely displace the genever version, which took over the Turf Club or Turf designation (originally the Turf Club seems to have been with Old Tom and the Martin-x with genever, but the rising popularity of Old Tom seems to have pulled it into the better-known drink). The French-vermouth Martini implicit in the Modern Bartender’s description was in play as well: in 1890, New York Herald editor Richard Blumenthal encountered it on a French transatlantic liner, where the purser was serving it as a preprandial appetizer. In general, the mid-1890s saw a trend for drier drinks in America, and the “Dry Martini” (the name is first recorded in 1896 in New York) benefited greatly. By 1900, it was the dominant version.
Up to this point, the Martini was a normal cocktail, just one of the many mixtures an American bartender was expected to have at his fingertips. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, though, it grew into something greater than that; it became, as Lowell Edmunds noted in his definitive exegesis of the drink and its meanings, “the premiere American cocktail.” It was a ubiquitous pillar of the new cocktail cult (e.g., 114 of the 284 cocktails the bartenders at the Waldorf-Astoria recorded in their bar book featured gin and vermouth—a full 40 percent). See Waldorf-Astoria. But more than that, the Dry Martini in particular was an icon of modernity itself; the liquid version of jazz, motion pictures, and the comic strip—the American lively arts, as critic Gilbert Seldes dubbed them. It was simple, direct, and strong. There was nothing hiding in it, but at the same time it had nuance and intelligence and verve. It was, as H. L. Mencken pronounced it, “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.”
And yet Americans were not satisfied. No other drink has spawned as many variations as the Martini—as many attempts to perfect the perfect. Between the 1880s and 1900, the drink evolved from a mix of Tom gin and Italian vermouth, with bitters, syrup, and a cherry, to Tom gin or the drier Plymouth or the even drier still London dry gin with French vermouth, orange bitters, and an olive. In the late 1890s, San Franciscan Walter D. K. Gibson took that Plymouth and dry vermouth and threw out the other two ingredients, creating the minimalist Gibson (the Gibson gained its characteristic onion garnish in the 1920s, once the Martini had lost its orange bitters and there was no longer anything but the garnish to distinguish the drinks). See
There were a great many other offshoots, most of them based on such mixological minutiae as different brands of dry gin or the addition of dashes of liqueurs (e.g., San Francisco’s popular, and early, Barry Cocktail from 1891, which adds drops of crème de menthe to a standard sweet Martini). But there were also fundamental shifts in the composition of the Martini itself. The first took place in the years before Prohibition. The original formula called for equal parts gin and vermouth, making for a fairly gentle drink. In the late 1890s, versions that are two parts of gin to one of vermouth (French or Italian) begin to appear; by the 1910s, that became the new standard, with some drinkers opting for a much stiffer drink: among the variations in the Waldorf-Astoria bar book are versions that are seven and even nine to one.
The next shift took place during World War II, when the standard Dry Martini (the sweet version having by then fallen by the wayside) was three to one, with four and five to one also common. (President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an avid Martini mixer, frequently went as far as seven to one.) In 1954, the United States Internal Revenue Service adjusted its rules specifying the minimum proportion of vermouth in a bottled Martini from one part to three of gin to one part to five. In this, the government was behind the curve, as it so often is: by 1954, a drinker who ordered a Martini would expect it to be at least five to one, while an order for an Extra Dry Martini generally meant no vermouth at all. Indeed, 1952 saw a fad for jokes based on ways of adding the least possible amount of vermouth to the drink. A typical sample: “Leave a capful of vermouth on the radiator overnight and then open the windows for an hour before pouring your gin into an ice-filled pitcher.”
The 1950s saw other changes as well: the Martini on the Rocks began appearing in some places (it was first attested to in 1950); in others it was being flavored with a splash of brine from the olive jar (this practice had been tried in one way or another since at least 1901; in the 1980s it would gain the name “Dirty Martini”) and there was of course the increasingly popular Vodka Martini, a 1930s experiment that was as annoying to traditionalist drinkers as it was alluring to others. By this point, the “See-Through” or “Silver Bullet,” as the minimal-vermouth Martini was sometimes known, was practically the last true cocktail standing: when Bernard DeVoto wrote, in 1949, that “there are only two cocktails … a slug of whiskey and … the martini,” he was speaking for his generation. Other cocktails existed, to be sure, but (outside of tiki bars) they were in eclipse, and that meant that gin or vodka and vermouth in various combination encroached on the depopulated niches of the cocktail ecosystem. See tiki.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Martini continued its lonely vigil. The classic gin version, served up with an olive or a twist, was caught in a protracted rear-guard action against the loose aggregation of highballs, coolers, shooters, and whatnot that defined the disco drink—sweet, brightly colored drinks that hid the taste of the alcohol in them. See Highball; cooler; and shooter. But the Martini was not well, either: all too often, it was a birdbath-sized basin of barely stirred or over-shaken (there seemed to be no in between) gin or vodka with a skewer of large, warm olives or a pigtail of pithy lemon peel floating in it. Vermouth was added in homeopathic amounts, if at all. The Martini was deeply unfashionable, and those who drank it were lucky to get one at all. In Europe, the situation was somewhat better, but only if you went to the top hotel bars, where things were done to IBA standard and cost accordingly.
In the mid-1980s, the Martini suddenly found itself in style again, an icon of the newly-minted yuppie class. Unfortunately, it was mostly the glass that people were interested in. Over the next decade and a half, that meant a large number of Chocolate Martinis and Cajun Martinis and other drinks, usually with names ending in “-tini,” that were basically disco drinks in v-shaped glasses; at least the most popular of these, the Cosmopolitan, was balanced and well-constructed. See
The cocktail renaissance of the twenty-first century affected the Martini in paradoxical ways. See cocktail renaissance. For the first time since the 1940s, it was back in balance, with a significant proportion of good vermouth in it (ratios went from about five to one all the way down to one to one, or even one part gin to two parts vermouth, as was occasionally seen in the 1880s). The olive was out and the twist was back, now as a broad swatch of thin-cut peel with its oil properly expressed on the surface of the drink. Good, firm ice, cracked to order, along with careful stirring and smaller-sized glasses, meant the drink was cold and silky again. Orange bitters came back, as did the occasional dash of real absinthe, popular in the 1890s and 1900s. See absinthe. One even started seeing the old Sweet Martini, with Italian vermouth and the newly revived Old Tom gin (this is often listed as a Martinez, to distinguish it from the Dry Martini).
In return for all that, all the Martini had to give up was its iconic status; its eighty-year-old position as king of all cocktails. The revival in bartending and mixology meant that there were other long-neglected classics being made just as carefully: Daiquiris, Manhattans, Old-Fashioneds, Clover Clubs—the list goes on. See Daiquiri; Manhattan Cocktail; Old-Fashioned Cocktail; and Clover Club. To revive that canon involved a good deal of analysis and re-engineering, and that hard look extended to things such as the v-shaped “Martini” glass, which was replaced by more practical styles. Without the glass and the olive, the Martini was just another cocktail, even if it was a better one than it had been in generations.
Recipes: Martini (1880s): Stir 45 ml Old Tom gin, 45 ml Italian vermouth, and 2 dashes Angostura or other aromatic bitters with cracked ice; strain and add cherry.
Dry Martini (1910): Stir 60 ml London dry or Plymouth gin, 30 ml French vermouth, 2 dashes orange bitters, and (optionally) 1 dash absinthe; strain and add lemon twist.
Extra Dry Martini (1955): Stir 90 ml London dry gin or vodka and 5 ml French vermouth; strain and add olive.
Crockett, Albert Stevens. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book. New York: A. S. Crockett, 1935.
DeVoto, Bernard. “The Easy Chair: For the Wayward and Beguiled.” Harper’s, December 1949, 68.
Edmunds, Lowell. Martini, Straight Up, 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
“Set ‘Em Up Again, Please!” Boston Herald, December 13, 1885 18.
“Very Dry Ruling …” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 6, 1954, 2.
“What’ll You Have.” Cleveland Leader, March 24, 1883, 6.
By: David Wondrich