i thought it might be time to get acquainted with vermouth. i have only ever known it as the toxic three-buck stuff dad uses as a pork tenderizer. to good use, but when on planet cocktail, i want no association with raw pork and garlic.
my first vermouth purchase, a year or so ago, was a little bottle of noilly prat. i thought i might try my hand at making a manhattan since i so enjoyed the one i had at cyrus. the end result was so unspeakably vile that i never used that vermouth again. in retrospect it was almost certainly user error, but since i soon after started achieving great things with lemon and lime, the vermouth was shoved to the back of the cabinet and forgotten about until last week when i poured it into the sink.
recently i read on erik ellestad’s blog that the bar manager at alembic uses almost exclusively punt e mes as a sweet vermouth. well, that was testimony enough for me. i picked up a bottle, came straight home, and mixed a manhattan with bourbon, punt e mes, and a teaspoon of luxardo cherry liqueur. tasted approx like satan’s pubes.
that was kind of depressing. so i decided to just start from square one: taste vermouth on its own. and it turns out…i love punt e mes on the rocks. it has kind of a robitussin-citrus pith quality to it, but it’s also rich and sweet and it all works together so beautifully. but if the purpose of vermouth is to lengthen and smooth a cocktail (which i thought i had read….somewhere), punt e mes is NOT GONNA FUCKING DO IT. punt is not a supporting cast member, propped discreetly against the backdrop. punt is the guy who plunges to the stage from the balcony while screaming latin platitudes, after shooting a president in the head.
so, its no surprise that my punt e mes manhattan went down like a liquified bicycle tire. i will need to taste other vermouths to say for sure (i bought a bottle of vya and am on the hunt for dolin and for carpano antica (cate uses this at p.)), but offhand the punt seems to have more in common with campari than with the pork marinade.
i’m going to try making a version of a negroni that i don’t hate. gin, vodka, punt e mes, and maybe grenadine if i need more sweet-n-sour. some orange bitters and a peel to finish.
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