A rocks glass of garnet-red vermouth over a large clear ice cube with an orange half-wheel and a skewered green olive, beside bowls of olives and salted almonds and an open unlabeled tin of fish on a marble counter

Vermouth and Soda, the Aperitivo to Learn First

In a martini, vermouth is a few drops. In a Negroni it is a third of the glass. In Turin, and later in Barcelona and Reus, it has long been a drink in its own right: poured cold before a meal, sometimes lengthened with soda, and served with something salty. Poured that way, the bottle tastes like itself, and that taste is easier to pick out later in a Negroni or a Manhattan.

This recipe makes four glasses and takes five minutes. The one decision that matters is how much soda to add, and a Turin label answers it in grams of sugar per liter.

What is in the bottle

Vermouth is wine. European law classes it as an aromatised wine. At least 75 percent of the volume must be wine, the alcohol must fall between 14.5 and 22 percent, and the characteristic taste must come from Artemisia, the wormwood genus. The name comes from the plant: Wermut is German for wormwood, and Turin took the word into Italian as vermut.

Turin dates its own version to 1786. That is the year Antonio Benedetto Carpano is said to have started selling a wormwood-flavored wine under that name from a shop under the arcades of what was then Piazza della Fiera, now Piazza Castello. The date is Turin's own tradition, and later accounts repeat it. The idea itself is much older, since wine steeped with wormwood was being prescribed as medicine long before anyone in Turin bottled it. Carpano's contribution was commercial: he gave a wormwood wine a name and sold it as something to drink for pleasure.

Other Turin houses followed, and by the late 1800s the drink had crossed to Catalonia. According to Reus's own tourism office, that town alone had around thirty producers making more than fifty brands by the turn of the century. The Spanish habit that grew from it is the subject of the vermut hour.

In March 2017 Italy made "Vermouth di Torino" a protected geographical indication, and the rules are unusually concrete. The vermouth must be made in Piedmont, the region of the autumn truffles and hazelnuts. The wormwood, Artemisia absinthium or pontica, must be grown or gathered there, at a minimum of half a gram of dried flowering tops per liter of finished vermouth. The alcohol must be at least 16 percent. The rules also define the sweetness words in grams of sugar per liter: extra dry means under 30, dry means under 50, and sweet means 130 or more.

That last number is the one to remember. A can of Coca-Cola carries 39 grams of sugar in 355 milliliters, or about 110 grams per liter. A vermouth that qualifies as sweet under the Turin rules therefore has more sugar per liter than cola. Poured straight from the fridge, a sweet rosso still sits heavy on the tongue for all its bitterness, which is why the soda is there.

How much soda

The soda thins the sugar and makes a heavy wine drink light. Too little and the glass tastes syrupy. Too much with a dry bottle and it turns into cold, faintly bitter water. The right amount follows the sugar in the bottle, and the sweetness term on the label points to it:

What the label says Sugar per liter, by the Turin rules Vermouth to soda Peel
Sweet / dolce, including a rosso labeled sweet 130 g or more. A rosso with no sweetness term: taste it cold 2 to 1 Orange
Bianco The color doesn't set the sugar; taste it cold 2 to 1 if it coats the tongue, 3 to 1 if it doesn't Lemon
Dry Under 50 g 4 to 1, or just a splash Lemon
Extra dry Under 30 g No soda. Ice, a lemon peel, and an olive in the glass Lemon

Vermouth made outside Turin doesn't have to follow those numbers, but the words work the same way in practice, and your palate settles the rest. The recipe below uses a sweet rosso, the style to learn first. It is the most forgiving, and it shows most plainly how bitterness and sweetness balance each other.

A 90 ml pour of vermouth at 16 to 18 percent alcohol contains about 11 to 13 grams of alcohol. The US standard drink is 14 grams, the amount in a five-ounce glass of 12 percent wine. So a full glass of this, lengthened with soda and ice, holds a little less alcohol than an ordinary glass of wine and lasts longer. That is part of why it suits the hour before a meal.

Ingredients, for four

  • 360 ml (12 oz) sweet red (rosso) vermouth, refrigerated. A Vermouth di Torino is a sound first bottle.
  • 180 ml (6 oz) soda water, refrigerated and unopened. One small 200 ml bottle covers four glasses, with a little to spare.
  • 1 orange
  • Large ice cubes, enough to fill four short glasses
  • Orange bitters or aromatic bitters, optional
  • For the plate: green olives, salted almonds, potato chips, and a tin of fish or shellfish

Method

  1. Chill everything ahead. Put the vermouth and the unopened soda in the refrigerator for at least two hours. An opened bottle of vermouth belongs there anyway, because it is wine and it oxidizes like wine. The vermouth storage guide explains how quickly it fades. If there is room, put the glasses in the freezer for fifteen minutes.
  2. Put the food out first. Olives, almonds, chips and an opened tin go on the table before anything is poured. Aperitivo is a drink served with food. For the olives, there are large green Italian Bella di Cerignola (shop Bella di Cerignola) or Spanish anchovy-stuffed olives (shop anchovy-stuffed olives), which bring the Barcelona way of doing this. Salted almonds and any tin from the Galician shelf do the rest.
  3. Fill the glasses with ice. Use short, heavy glasses (double rocks glasses (shop double rocks glasses) are the right size) and fill them with the largest cubes you have. Large cubes have less surface area for their volume, so they melt more slowly, and the dilution comes from the soda, which you control. Two-inch cube trays (shop two-inch cube trays) make this easy.
  4. Pour the vermouth. Pour 90 ml into each glass, two pours from the large side of a 1 oz / 1.5 oz jigger (shop 1 oz / 1.5 oz jigger). Measure it, because the soda ratio only works when the vermouth amount is fixed.
  5. Add the soda gently. Open the bottle only now and pour 45 ml into each glass, down the inside wall or along the back of a barspoon rather than straight onto the ice. Give each glass one slow lift from the bottom with the spoon and don't stir. The more the soda splashes, the more fizz it loses before the glass reaches anyone.
  6. Add the peel and taste. Cut a wide strip of orange peel with a peeler or a channel knife (shop channel knife), leaving most of the white pith on the orange. Hold it skin side down over the glass and squeeze. A fine mist of oil should hit the surface, and the smell arrives at once. Rub the peel around the rim and drop it in. Taste. If the drink still coats your tongue, add another splash of soda, or one dash of orange bitters for a sharper edge. The bitters guide explains why a single dash has so much effect.

When the glass is wrong

What you taste Likely cause What to do
Flat, like watered-down wine The soda was warm, already opened, or poured hard onto the ice Use a cold, freshly opened bottle and pour it down the side of the glass
Syrupy Not enough soda for a sweet bottle Go to 2 to 1, and add a dash of bitters if it is still heavy
Thin and bitter A dry vermouth got the sweet-rosso amount of soda Check the table above; dry bottles need little or no soda
Brown at the edges, nutty, faintly like cardboard The bottle sat open at room temperature It has oxidized. Start a fresh bottle and keep it in the fridge once opened
Soda foams over when opened Warm soda, a bottle that was shaken, or altitude (see below) Chill the soda thoroughly and open it slowly over the sink

In Denver, the soda behaves differently

Air pressure in Denver runs around 24.5 to 25 inches of mercury, roughly 83 percent of the sea-level standard. Carbonated drinks lose their bubbles because they hold far more dissolved carbon dioxide than they can keep once the bottle is open. Research on sparkling wine measures that excess against the air pressure above the glass, so at lower pressure the same soda starts further out of balance. That should make it foam harder when opened and go flat sooner in the glass.

The same research points to the fixes. Cold liquid loses carbon dioxide more slowly than warm, and a gentle pour down a tilted glass keeps noticeably more of it than pouring straight down the middle. At 5,280 feet, that means small bottles, opened only at the pour, and no half-empty liter from last weekend. Other ways altitude changes a kitchen are in the Denver cooking guide.

Where it goes next

The next drink to learn adds one ingredient. In 1867 Gaspare Campari moved his caffè into Milan's new Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, at the corner facing the Duomo, and served his red bitter there. Mixed with sweet vermouth from Turin, it became the Milano-Torino, a drink named for the two cities its ingredients came from. Add soda and it becomes the Americano. The familiar story is that it got the name in the 1920s, when Americans escaping Prohibition drank it in Europe. That explanation is widely repeated but hard to verify, and the drink already existed under its older name. To make one, pour 45 ml each of sweet rosso and red bitter aperitivo over ice, then add soda and an orange peel by the method above.

Ian Fleming made the Americano the first drink James Bond orders in Casino Royale (1953). In the later short story "From a View to a Kill" (1960), Fleming spells out Bond's version: bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda Bond always stipulated Perrier, because in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink. Step 5 rests on the same idea, that the soda deserves attention.

Once the soda has been set by the sugar in one glass, the same balance of sugar against bitterness is easy to taste in a Manhattan or a Negroni, where there is no soda to adjust it. For anyone at the table who isn't drinking, the zero-proof Negroni balances the same bitterness, sweetness and citrus.

The glasses, jigger, bitters, soda, olives and almonds for this recipe are linked above. The vermouth has to come from a wine shop. The Ambrosian Pantry is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and orders ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. For more on the plate, see the guide to bar nuts and the olive guide.

Sources & Further Reading

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