Martini

The Origin

The Martini's origins are genuinely disputed and the dispute is unlikely to be resolved. The most commonly cited version credits a San Francisco bartender named Julio Richelieu who allegedly served a similar drink to a miner passing through Martinez, California, in the 1880s, producing a drink that became known as the Martinez and evolved into the Martini. An alternative account places the Martinez at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, served by a bartender named Jerry Thomas who included a recipe for it in a later edition of his bar guide. Neither account is verifiable beyond reasonable doubt.

What is documented is that the Martini in a recognisable form, gin and dry vermouth stirred and served cold, appeared in bar guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became the defining cocktail of the twentieth century by a margin that no other drink came close to matching. Its simplicity, its adaptability, and its association with a particular kind of adult sophistication made it the drink that more cultural figures, writers, filmmakers, and public personalities referenced than any other. That cultural weight is inseparable from the drink itself.

The Vermouth Question

The mid-twentieth century fashion for extremely dry Martinis, in which the vermouth was reduced progressively until it was present only as a rinse or a gesture in the direction of the bottle, produced a generation of drinkers who understood the Martini as cold gin served in a specific glass. That fashion was partly a response to the poor quality of vermouth available in many American bars during the post-Prohibition decades, where bottles were routinely left unrefrigerated and unconsumed for months until the product had degraded into something genuinely unpleasant. The logical response to bad vermouth was less vermouth. The correct response is better vermouth.

A two to one Martini built with a fresh, quality dry vermouth kept refrigerated and replaced within four weeks is a categorically different drink from the same ratio built with a stale bottle. The vermouth in a two to one build contributes approximately one third of the total volume. At that proportion it cannot be a passive ingredient. It contributes wine character, herbal complexity, and a softness that balances the proof and the juniper of the gin. That contribution is the point of the Martini. Removing it produces something else.

Gin Selection

London Dry is the conventional and most defensible choice for a classic Martini. The style requires by definition that no flavouring or colouring be added after distillation, which produces a gin whose botanical character is fixed and reliable across batches. Tanqueray, Beefeater, and Plymouth are the most commonly cited benchmarks and all three perform well in the two to one format. Contemporary gins with heavily floral or fruit-forward botanical profiles can produce interesting Martinis but risk producing a drink that tastes more of the gin's individual character than of the Martini as a format. Whether that is desirable is a matter of preference rather than correctness.

Vodka Martinis are beyond the scope of this entry. The vodka Martini is a legitimate drink. It is not a Martini in the sense that the word has any consistent meaning.

The Stir

A Martini is stirred, not shaken. The instruction is not arbitrary. Shaking a Martini introduces aeration that produces a slightly cloudy, frothy result and a different texture from the smooth, cold clarity that stirring achieves. It also produces a different dilution profile. James Bond's preference for a shaken Martini is the most frequently cited argument for the alternative. It is not a strong argument. Stir for 25 to 30 seconds over large ice, strain into a properly chilled glass, and the result speaks for itself.

How to Serve It

Stirred, strained, and served cold in a chilled Martini glass or coupe with expressed lemon peel over the surface. The olive variation, in which a brine-rinsed or plain green olive replaces the lemon twist, produces a saltier, more savoury result that some drinkers prefer and that the drink handles well. Both are correct. The choice between them is the kind of preference the Martini has always accommodated. What it does not accommodate is indifference to the quality of the ingredients or the precision of the build.