Boozehound (18 page)

About ninety minutes west of Milan by train or car, Torino, the birthplace of vermouth, flaunts an age-old happy hour scene. It’s a bit of a murky history, but either Giovanni and Carlo Cinzano created the first vermouth here in 1757, or Antonio Benedetto Carpano first produced the fortified wine in 1786. Either way, vermouth was inspired by a German fortified wine that used wormwood. The word
vermouth
derives from
wermut
, the German word for wormwood. Carpano was soon followed into the vermouth business by Alessandro Martini and Luigi Rossi in 1863.

Though most people have heard of these historic brands, they are not the only vermouths to be found in Torino. In the nineteenth century, nearly every major café in Torino produced its own vermouth, and some of these formulas exist to this day. I visited the small but stately century-old Caffè Mulassano on the Piazza Castello, with its lovely marble bar. Caffè Mulassano claims it was the favored gathering place of the Royal House of Savoy. The white-jacketed waiters still serve the bar’s own sweet vermouth—a recipe dating back to 1879—a red, bitter house liqueur called Liquore delle Alpi, which looks and tastes like Campari. I took my Mulassano vermouth on the rocks, per tradition in Torino, and enjoyed a complimentary plate of little panini and tramezzini sandwiches and olives.

After Mulassano, I walked a few blocks on sidewalks covered by ornate porticos to the grandest of Torino’s historic cafés, the San Carlo, which opened in 1822. I entered between its gilded pilasters and under the huge, glitzy chandelier, and the tuxedoed bartender mixed me an Americano. A local guy was also sipping an Americano, while his dog slept at his feet. He told me I should check out Eataly, a new food emporium situated in the old Carpano vermouth distillery near the edge of the city. Apparently, one of the hippest new spots in Torino happened to be the supermarket. On the top floor, a museum celebrates Carpano vermouth and Punt e Mes, a vermouth to which a little bit of a Camparilike bitter is added (the name means “point and a half” in Piemontese—a point of sweetness, plus a half point of bitterness, supposedly named for a favorable rise in the stock market that benefited Carpano).

“Not many Americans like vermouth, do they?” he said. “They only put a little eyedropper in their dry martinis, yes?”

Actually, I told him, some people in the United States were finally beginning, slowly, to appreciate vermouth. “It’s a bit of a trend.”

“Vermouth is trendy? Ha!” he said. This, of course, was amusing to someone living in Torino, especially during happy hour, when most everyone had vermouth in their glasses.

“The biggest issue,” I said, “is that people don’t realize they need to refrigerate it and treat it like a wine.” The man just smiled and shook his head. In most Italian bars, vermouth is poured dozens of times every evening, so storage is rarely an issue.

Given that vermouth is so entwined with Italy’s happy hour scene, a vermouth pilgrimage seemed like a must. The next day, I traveled twenty minutes to the town of Pessione, where I visited the Martini distillery, housed in a sprawling whitewashed eighteenth-century villa. A greeter led me through the gate and the garden and into a stark white laboratory where a man in a white lab coat poured glasses of extra-dry, rosso, bianco, and rosé vermouths. For more than a century, until late 2010, Martini was better known in the United States under the name Martini & Rossi. The reason, of course, had been the inevitable confusion between the Martini brand and the American cocktail of the same name. Whether Americans will be any less confused remains to be seen. But in Italy, if you order a “Martini” you will receive a glass of bianco vermouth on the rocks.

“If you ask young people in Italy what their favorite Martini is, they’ll say bianco,” said Luciano Boero, the head of production at the plant. “For older people like me, however, Martini Rosso is the most popular.”

Vermouth is 75 percent wine, and all the wine for Martini vermouth—even the rosso—is a basic white, such as Trebbiano. The wine provides only the structure and body. “To make a great vermouth, the wine must be neutral,” said Alberto Oricco, an oenologist and quality-control supervisor at the plant. “It’s important not to use a wine with a big flavor, because the flavor comes from the herbs.”

The aromatic herbs that give Martini vermouth its flavor are mixed secretly in a lab in Geneva. While Boero knows which herbs are used, and did admit to some ingredients, even he doesn’t know the exact recipe. Besides the wine and botanicals, there is also alcohol, sugar, and, in vermouth rosso, caramel added for color.

Because we sampled at room temperature, I could much more easily pick out aromas and flavors. As we tasted the pale yellow extra-dry, there was a scent of iris, lemon peels, and raspberry, and a hint of sweet wine in the taste. “We use a little Marsala wine in this blend,” Boero said.

We moved on to the rosso, which is actually brown, and what we commonly call sweet vermouth. “Why is it called red? I don’t know why,” Boero said with a chuckle. Besides the interesting note of coriander, one of the most important ingredients is cinchona, a tree whose bark gives sweet vermouth a bitter kick. “We never use spicy herbs,” Boero said, “only mountain herbs.”

The ten minutes I spent tasting Martini Rosso was easily the most time I’d ever spent thinking about sweet vermouth. Even more impressive, for me, was the bianco—different from the dry—which has always been available in the United States but little known. The scent of thyme and oregano and the tastes of cloves and vanilla create a wonderful balance of sweet and savory. I could drink bianco vermouth on the rocks, with a twist of lemon, all afternoon. To me, it is no wonder that bianco is the most popular vermouth in Italy, accounting for half of Martini’s production.

It’s likely surprising to many, but vermouths did not appear on this earth simply as a mixer for martinis and Manhattans. Vermouths were not originally created for being mixed at all, but rather to drink alone. “I don’t think Luigi Rossi ever thought to create Martini Rosso so that it could be mixed with other liquors,” said Cristiana Fanciotto, Martini’s spokesperson, as we sipped Americanos in the corporate bar. “He’d already created the perfect mix. There was no need to mix it with anything else.”

That night, I went to happy hour at Eataly, which was built with the support of Slow Food, the international movement that started in the Piedmont region. Besides the very best Slow Food–approved artisan foodstuffs on offer, there are nine casual dining spots, each focusing on a specific type of food, such as pasta, seafood, meats and cheeses, vegetables, or pizza. The entire bottom floor is given over to wine, beer, and spirits (in the wine section, you can fill up your own liter jug with respectable table wine for two euros).

After I gorged myself during happy hour, I ended up in Eataly’s wine bar. There, I saw the woman behind the bar pouring something called Giulio Cocchi Barolo Chinato. I’d only tasted Barolo Chinato once before at a dinner party in California and had never seen it since. I asked her to pour me a glass, and this time I concentrated fully on this smooth, spicy drink with just a kiss of quinine on the tongue. It was a revelation—bitter, lush, complex, like nothing else I’d tasted. The bartender suggested I go upstairs and buy a hunk of dark chocolate and come back to finish my glass. Which I did. It confirmed my sudden belief that Barolo Chinato is one of the finest after-dinner quaffs imaginable, and a better match for desserts than even port. The problem now, of course, was that I would need to track this down outside of Italy.

The bartender told me a little more about the drink.
China
in Italian means cinchona (or quinine bark). So Barolo Chinato is, literally, Barolo wine that has been
china
-ed, or infused with quinine bark and other herbs and spices, including rhubarb root, star anise, citrus peel, gentian, fennel, juniper, and cardamom seed. The spirit is produced in much the same way as its Piedmontese cousin, vermouth, but with one big difference: Vermouth generally begins with a banal white wine to which the herbs are added. Barolo Chinato begins with Barolo, Italy’s greatest wine, made with the Nebbiolo grapes of the region.

There is some question as to who invented Barolo Chinato. In the nineteenth century, many pharmacists and chefs in and around Torino were experimenting with vermouths and other fortified wines. One of them, Giuseppe Cappellano, is often credited as Barolo Chinato’s creator, and the Cappellano brand is available in the United States. But Barolo Chinato is also claimed by Giulio Cocchi, a Tuscan pastry chef who came to Asti and, inspired by the region’s vermouth industry, soon invented his own formula in 1891.

Cocchi’s was the Barolo Chinato I fell in love with, so I decided to visit its producer in Cocconato, near Asti. The brand name Giulio Cocchi is well-known in Italy for its Asti Spumante, but the company also continues to make its founder’s special formula. “We like to think the Barolo Chinato concept came because he put together the world of vermouth in Piemonte with the world of the Tuscan monasteries and their use of spices and herbs,” says Roberto Bava, fourth-generation winemaker with Bava Winery, which now owns Giulio Cocchi. “His formula was, and still is, very complex. One of my brothers knows the formula. It is in an old booklet, handwritten by Giulio Cocchi, and it’s in a bank vault.”

In the 1920s, Giulio Cocchi opened a chain of Barolo Chinato bars in cities including Milan and Torino (the one in Torino still exists) and as far away as Caracas, Venezuela. But by the 1960s and 1970s, Barolo Chinato had gone out of fashion, swept away by the tide of amari, mass-market vermouths, and aperitivi such as Punt e Mes that began to flood the Italian market. Cocchi persisted, selling its spumante, and eventually was bought by the Bava family in 1977. But its Barolo Chinato languished for decades.

That is, until the all-important chocolate-Chinato connection came to light. Bava is president of something he referred to as the “Italian Chocolate Association.” Several years ago, he says, the association’s members began searching for the best after-dinner drink to pair with fine chocolate, another Piedmontese specialty. After supposedly rigorous testing, Bava says, “We learned that Barolo Chinato was the absolute best match for chocolate.” Regardless of how subjective that research must have been, it seems to have been a eureka moment in the history of food and drink pairings because, believe me, it is true. “Now,” Bava says, “if you ask anyone in Italy, ‘What do you pair with chocolate?’ They will say, ‘Barolo Chinato.’ ”

Bava says the chocolate pairing concept has saved Barolo Chinato from extinction and spurred other producers to put their versions on the market. “I’m proud of this. It’s probably the only idea in this life that I will leave behind,” he says, with a wink.

While we tasted, Bava brought out a bottle of an aperitif called Cocchi Aperitivo Americano, made from a white Moscato di Asti and infused with cinchona bark. I almost flipped. Barolo Chinato had been revelation enough. But Cocchi Aperitivo Americano is a missing link in the cocktail world—a true white-wine quinquina. Many of us know, and have fallen in love with, Lillet Blanc, the lovely and refreshing white wine-and-citrus aperitif. Lillet began life as Kina Lillet, which had a much higher quinine content, then changed its recipe in 1986. Much of Lillet’s recent popularity can be traced to the 2006 film
Casino Royale
(based on the original 1953 novel), in which James Bond orders his famed Vesper cocktail with gin, vodka, and Kina Lillet, “shaken, not stirred.” For a while after that, you couldn’t find a cocktail menu that didn’t have some variation of a Vesper. The only problem is that, without the quinine level of Kina Lillet, the drink is nearly impossible to reproduce. Well, Cocchi Americano might be as close to Kina Lillet as anyone is likely to find these days.

When I returned home, I was not surprised to find that Eric Seed had made a visit to Bava before I had and would become the U.S. importer of Cocchi Aperitivo Americano. In fact, the following summer I ran into him in Philadelphia at Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co., pouring samples for the bartenders. “Let’s make a Vesper!” I said.

“I can’t make a Vesper,” said Colin, one of the bartenders. “I don’t have vodka.”