A lawyer by trade, Adam Ford was launched into the booze business by a single, beguiling drink, served neat, that he was poured in an Italian mountain town.
“It blew me away,” says Ford. The wondrous elixir in question? Vermouth.
If you find this surprising, you’ve got plenty of company. For decades, vermouth has been maligned and misunderstood, confined to dusty bottles in the depths of the liquor cabinet.
But that’s changing. Ford launched Atsby Vermouth in September — it’s now offered in dozens of bars and shops around the city — and two other locally produced vermouths will soon hit the market. They follow several new West Coast and European brands. The long-ignored aperitif is finally getting its turn in the spotlight.
“It’s used in all these popular cocktails, but nobody really understands it,” says Max Messier, 36, a Brooklyn-based mixologist whose Bespoke Vermouth will debut this spring, joining Atsby and the newly launched Uncouth Vermouth, based in Red Hook.
Just to clear up any misunderstandings, vermouth is a wine that’s been steeped in botanicals and fortified with an unaged spirit, often grape brandy. Herbalized wines were drunk for millennia, but vermouth as we know it emerged in Europe in the 17th century, and morphed into two main styles, Italian sweet and French dry.
In the US it found favor during the cocktail boom of the late 19th century. “They put it into everything,” says Martin Doudoroff, the founder of Vermouth101.com. Americans continued to drink vermouth as an aperitif until the 1960s, when sipping it straight began to fall out of favor. Now, the cocktail renaissance and boom in small spirit makers are bringing it back in style. “In the last three years, we’ve just had this avalanche of new products,” Doudoroff says.
It was the craft cocktail movement that inspired Ford to create Atsby. He saw “the potential to make something with more finesse, more complexity” than what was already out there. After much tinkering in the kitchen of his SoHo apartment, Ford arrived at two varieties: The sweeter Armadillo Cake, with muscovado sugar and 32 botanicals including wild celery and shiitake mushrooms, and the drier Amberthorn, made with anise, lavender, grapefruit peel and honey.
Uncouth’s Bianca Miraglia also saw the potential for creative vermouths. She experimented with some 100 varieties, using foraged or locally sourced herbs, and plans to focus on seasonal “market-driven” sippers.
Messier will premiere with three flagship styles. They include Sanguine, a rosso-style vermouth “with big spice notes of juniper, mace and ginger,” and Floret, a semi-dry made with chamomile, honeysuckle, riesling and pinot grigio. A working bartender, he originally started to make his own vermouth because he was dissatisfied with what was available to use in his cocktails.
“There had been nothing new in the market for years,” he says. “I’m trying to shift the paradigm a bit.”