The Manhattan, the Martini and the vermouth age

The 1806 cocktail was spirit, sugar, water and bitters. For sixty years that was enough. Then a fortified, aromatized wine from Turin arrived on American bars, and the drink that had been a short, sharp pick-me-up became something you could sit with. The Manhattan and the Martini are what happened when American whiskey and gin met vermouth, and the half-century in which they were worked out is the most consequential in the cocktail's history.

The wine from Turin

Vermouth as we know it was commercialized in Turin in 1786 by Antonio Benedetto Carpano, who took a local tradition of wine infused with wormwood and other botanicals and sold it under the German-derived name. The sweet, red Italian style came first. The pale, dry French style followed a few years later. Adam Ford, in a talk for the Culinary Historians of New York, dates vermouth's arrival in the city to the 1853 World's Fair and says it was established by the 1860s, the decade in which a whole family of cocktails was built on it. Other writers push the first imports back to the 1840s. The exact year is less important than the effect. A bartender with vermouth on the shelf could soften a spirit, lengthen it and perfume it with one pour, and American bartenders of the 1870s used it on everything.

The first modern cocktail

Difford's Guide calls the Manhattan the first modern cocktail, and the reasoning is sound: it is the old whiskey cocktail, whiskey and bitters and sugar, with vermouth doing the sweetening. It emerged in the 1860s or 1870s. The first time anyone wrote it down was 5 September 1882, in the New York Letter column of The Olean Democrat, a small upstate paper, which described a fashionable new mixture of whiskey, vermouth and bitters that went by several names: Manhattan cocktail, Turf Club cocktail, Jockey Club cocktail. Two years later it was in four bar books at once, by O.H. Byron, George Winter, J.W. Gibson and Charlie Paul, and the recipes already disagreed about bitters, sweetener and garnish, as Manhattan recipes still do.

Who made the first one is unknown. The best evidence is a 1923 memoir by William Mulhall, a former head bartender of the Hoffman House, who said the drink was invented in the 1860s by a man named Black who kept a place on Broadway. David Wondrich found a George Black who ran a bar called the Manhattan Inn at 439 Broadway from 1874 until his death in 1881. A bartender naming a drink after his own bar is the most ordinary explanation available, which counts in its favor.

The Martinez problem

Gin got its vermouth drink next. The Martinez appears for the first time in Byron's 1884 Modern Bartender, presented as a variation on the Manhattan: old tom gin in place of whiskey, sweet vermouth, a touch of maraschino, bitters. It is a sweet, rich, aromatic drink, closer to a Manhattan than to anything a modern drinker would call a Martini.

The Martinez carries two legends. One says Jerry Thomas invented it in San Francisco for a traveler heading to the town of Martinez across the bay. The other says a bartender in the town of Martinez itself made it first. The Thomas story fails on a date: the Martinez is not in his 1862 book and appears only in the 1887 edition, two years after his death, in a text his publisher assembled. Wondrich is certain Thomas did not create it. The honest position is that the drink's parentage is split between a San Francisco camp and a New York camp and that neither can produce a birth certificate.

The Martini is named

The word Martini enters print in 1888, in the revised edition of Harry Johnson's Bartenders' Manual: old tom gin, sweet vermouth, curacao, bitters, stirred. It is the Martinez under another name, and the name is the interesting part. The obvious candidate is the Turin vermouth house that became Martini and Rossi, whose vermouth was widely sold in America and which was advertising the Dry Martini by name around the turn of the century. Henry Wehmann printed a similar recipe in 1891.

The next thirty years are a slow drying out, and Difford's Guide's timeline of recipes lets you watch it happen. In 1898 a drink called the Marguerite appears: equal parts gin and dry vermouth, with an olive. In 1903 Tim Daly suggests two parts old tom gin to one part dry vermouth and calls the result very dry. In 1904 John Applegreen's bar book prints a Martini Cocktail, Dry, and Frank Newman, writing in French at the Ritz in Paris, gives a Dry Martini of equal parts gin and dry vermouth. In 1906 Louis Muckensturm of Boston prints the full name Dry Martini for the first time, with dry gin and dry vermouth, and the drink is recognizably the one we pour. The curacao dropped out almost at once. The orange bitters stayed until the 1940s and have lately come back.

What vermouth did

Three things changed in these fifty years, and they are worth naming because they are the foundation of stirred drinks today. The cocktail acquired a modifier, a second liquid with its own character beside the sugar and bitters, which is why Manhattans and Martinis are built in a mixing glass and stirred rather than shaken. The dry style emerged, first as a preference and then as a fashion, so that by 1910 a Martini could mean either a sweet drink or a dry one and you had to say which. And the brand entered the recipe. Vermouth makers advertised the cocktails that used their product, and the Martini, whatever its etymology, carried a producer's name into bars across the country.

The vermouth age did not survive the middle of the century. Adam Ford dates vermouth's American decline to the Second World War, and after that it was used in dashes and then in rumor. The current revival, which began around 2009, has returned it to its proper measure. A Manhattan is still whiskey, vermouth and bitters. A Martini is still gin and vermouth. The proportions are a matter of taste, and the taste has a history.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1882 newspaper mention, the 1884 recipes, the 1888 naming of the Martini, the 1904 and 1906 dry recipes. Folklore: the Manhattan Club banquet for Jennie Jerome in 1874, which first appears in newspaper columns of 1945 and 1950 and which she could not have attended, having given birth to Winston Churchill in England that November; Jerry Thomas's Martinez; the bartender in Martinez, California; and the Knickerbocker Hotel bartender who supposedly invented the Dry Martini in 1911, five years after it was in print.

Sources

• Manhattan cocktail: history. Difford's Guide, Simon Difford, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1221/manhattan-cocktail/history
• Martini history. Difford's Guide, Simon Difford, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1121/martini/martini-history
• Classic: Martinez. Australian Bartender, 2013. https://australianbartender.com.au/2013/04/17/classic-martinez/
• Vermouth: The Spirit That Started It All. Culinary Historians of New York, Adam Ford, undated. https://www.culinaryhistoriansny.org/?p=1510
• Johnson, Harry. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-63