Grape & Grain | Hong Kong’s love affair with the martini, now with added vermouth
The fortified wine, once all but sidelined in the classic cocktail – James Bond’s favourite drink – has made a comeback thanks to some innovative bartenders. Here are five places in the city to get your fix
Dry martinis are getting wetter. For many years, the mark of a sophisticated drinker was considered to be how close to neat spirit he or she liked a martini to be. Vermouth was being added merely as a light mist sprayed from an atomiser as early as the 1950s.
It was not always so. The origins of the cocktail we call a martini today are much disputed and none of the theories are verifiable, but it seems likely that the drink is descended from the Manhattan – made with American whiskey, vermouth and bitters – via another cocktail called the Martinez which substituted gin for whiskey.
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The 1887 Jerry Thomas recipe for the Martinez stipulates sweet vermouth, and early martini recipes call for the same, as well as for relatively sweet Old Tom gin.
The “dry” martini, which appeared early in the 20th century, originally included bitters, and used dry gin and dry vermouth mixed in roughly equal parts. Over time the bitters were sidelined, and when James Bond first ordered a martini “shaken not stirred”, subverting the usual practice, the proportion of spirit to vermouth was down to four measures of the first and only a half measure of the second.
Somewhere along the way the “dry” in dry martini came to be assumed not to refer to the type of vermouth but to be an instruction to reduce its presence. Most bartenders today would take the order “very dry” to mean use little or none.
