Vermouth and aperitifs

Wine, not spirit

Vermouth begins as wine. It is fortified with alcohol and then flavoured with a range of botanicals, one of which must be wormwood — Wermut in German, and the source of the name. The result usually sits between 15% and 20% alcohol, halfway between wine and spirit, which is why it both dilutes and seasons: it is what keeps a stirred drink from being neat spirit.

Dry and sweet

Dry vermouth is pale and lean, herbal and faintly saline. It is the half of the Dry Martini that talks back to the gin, and the proportion chosen is where a bartender's personal taste shows most plainly. Sweet red vermouth is darker and sweeter, with spice, orange peel and a bitter finish; in the Manhattan it catches the whiskey's heat and gives it somewhere to land.

Lillet

Lillet comes from the Bordeaux region and blends wine with fruit liqueurs, making it softer than vermouth, with stone fruit and citrus. The recipe was adjusted in the 1980s and today's bottling is less bitter than the old one, so pre-war recipes such as the Vesper often need their proportions nudged to read as they were written.

Bitter aperitifs

Campari is an Italian red bitter, sharply citrus-peel and herbal, at a strength well below that of spirits. Aperol is orange in colour, sweeter, and lighter in both bitterness and alcohol; the two are not interchangeable. The Negroni is the cleanest demonstration of the category — gin, Campari and sweet red vermouth stirred in equal measure, one part each of bitter, sweet and botanical.

Amaro

Amaro covers the Italian bitter herbal liqueurs generally, running from mildly bitter to punishing, from light to syrupy. Fernet is the most bitter and most mentholated branch of that family; in Hanky-Panky a couple of dashes are enough to turn the whole drink.

Port

Port is a fortified wine from the Douro valley in Portugal. Grape spirit is added partway through fermentation, which halts it and leaves the remaining sugar in the wine — hence its sweetness and weight. Porto Flip shakes it with cognac and egg yolk, the wine's body and the yolk together making the texture.

After opening

All of these are wine, and wine oxidises. The aromatics dull first, then a tired sourness arrives. A bottle of vermouth left on a warm shelf for months is simply a different ingredient from a freshly opened one. Buy small bottles, refrigerate them, and finish them within a few weeks — it improves a Martini more than any technique will.

Further reading: gin, bitters, stirring.