La Hora del Vermut: The Spanish Vermouth Hour
In Spain, vermouth is a drink - but more than that, it's an hour of the day. When someone says they're going to "hacer el vermut", they're not promising to actually drink any vermouth; they might just as easily have a beer. What they are promising is that somewhere between noon and lunch they'll be standing at a bar with something in their hand and someone beside them. The drink has turned into a time of day, much the way going out "for one" back home in Czechia never means just one. And what's in the glass is simpler than all that ritual suggests: vermouth (in Spanish vermut, colloquially vermú) is white wine infused with wormwood and spices, sweetened, fortified to 15 to 22 percent, and in Spanish cuisine it's drunk undiluted, over ice, before lunch. Its red color doesn't come from red wine but from caramel.
A German Word, an Italian Drink, a Spanish Hour
Three countries fit into a single glass. The name is German: Wermut means wormwood, the herb without which, under European rules, the drink isn't allowed to call itself vermouth at all; it reached Spanish by way of the French vermouth. The drink is Italian: the first commercial vermouth was mixed in Turin in 1786 by the herbalist Antonio Benedetto Carpano, whose shop supposedly never closed, not even at night. And the custom is Spanish. Spain didn't invent vermouth - it just took it seriously: in Italian cuisine it is still an evening drink, an aperitivo between six and nine, or something that disappears into cocktails, and the French branch from Marseille and Chambéry is dry and pale, a long way from ice and an olive. The Spanish kept the sweeter, darker, spiced style, moved it to midday and set a counter of tapas beside it. Argentina took it furthest of all: Italian and Spanish immigrants brought vermouth with them, the afternoon film screening in Buenos Aires has been named after it since 1912 - the función vermú - and Argentines now drink more of it than Italians do, at least according to the producers' figures.
Reus, Paris, London
The Spanish chapter isn't written in Madrid but in Reus, a town near Tarragona that traded in spirits so briskly in the 19th century that people used to say "Reus, París, Londres" - prices, so the story goes, were set in those three places. Vermouth arrived in the second half of the 19th century and the local distillers started making it their own way: the Yzaguirre brand has been going since 1884 and Reus still calls itself the capital of vermouth, even if only three plants operate there today, not dozens. It also has a vermouth museum that grew out of a single bottle of Cinzano the collector Joan Tàpies was given by his father; the collection now runs to more than five thousand pieces. It never ends at one bottle. The midday hour itself is younger than the guidebooks would like: before the Civil War vermouth was more of an evening drink, and it didn't move to midday until the 1940s or so, either because working hours had changed or, as the other version has it, because of Sunday mass, after which people went straight from church to the bar. Nobody has pinned down which of the two it was. Both agree on Sunday at noon.
On Tap, With Ice and a Splash of Soda
Inside, vermouth is mostly wine, at least three quarters of the volume, and the rest is the herbalist's workshop: wormwood for the bitterness, cinnamon, cloves and orange peel for the aroma, sugar to smooth it all out and a little spirit to keep it. Wormwood is what makes or breaks it: without it you have flavored wine, with it a bitter aperitif that whets your appetite before lunch. In Andalusia they make vermouth from Jerez wines, so sherry and wormwood end up in the same glass.
In a bar you drink it de grifo, on tap or out of a barrel behind the counter, and that draft version, often the house's own "vermut de la casa", ranks higher than anything with a label. The glass gets ice, a slice of orange or lemon and an olive, and then comes the question it pays to have an answer ready for: con sifón? Soda from the siphon thins the vermouth out and gives it some sparkle; undiluted it stays fuller - both are right, only the first goes down faster, which during the vermouth hour is more of an advantage. On the counter alongside sit olives, chips, cockles out of a tin and a gilda on its stick; pick up the menu and you'll find half of it is conservas, and that's by design, not out of necessity. It's taken most seriously in Madrid, where century-old taverns pour vermouth on tap, and in Barcelona, which has a whole bar route built around it.
Two Vermuterías in Alicante
I spent my vermouth hour in Alicante, and I did it twice: at the vermutería Pipirrana Vermut just outside the center and at La Guapa downstairs in the central market, where the vermouth list runs as long as a wine list (see Where to Eat in Alicante). I had the red in both, and at La Guapa the house one on tap. It came across sweet and orangey first, then the bitterness of the wormwood turned up a beat later, and within a few minutes the ice had softened it so much that the second half of the glass tasted different from the first. I don't remember what it cost - you pay at the end, and the end wasn't part of the plan. In Spain, vermouth is an hour. I let mine strike twice in Alicante.
