Gin!
Not all Gins are created equal. Until after the fourth martini....
By Nancy Rommelmann
I have become puritanical when it comes to cocktails, and I blame it on the gin. Before, I could easily be led astray, so long as what you were giving me was not sweet, or, just a little sweet. I’ve been lured by mint muddled with sugar; in the tropics I’ve sworn fealty to guava juice and rum. And was I game last year when a trusted bartender slipped me a Thai concoction that included crushed betel nut leaf, a leaf that tastes like clove oil just before it makes your tongue go numb? I was.
This, however, was not the turning point; the moment when I said, enough with other boozes, I’m a gin girl. This moment came last summer, when my husband and I were working 14-hour days, and wanted something cold and potent when we got home, and beer wasn’t going to cut it.
“Gin and tonic?” he asked one night, and that was it; we were hooked. We weren’t buying any sort of fancy gin, mostly Seagram’s Extra Dry, in the biggest bottles we could find, which never seemed big enough, a condition that caused me to once tell my husband that what we needed, was a leg of gin.
But never mind that. The drinking of gin turned out to have the ancillary effect of putting me off other spirits. The rums, the whiskeys, the tequilas; that pear eau de vie a friend bought from Germany; the ersatz bottle of absinthe: all were too sweet or too smoky. And don’t get me started on vodka, the good girl of the booze world, the one who claims to be everybody’s friend, but who, in fact, brings nothing to the party but a little burn. Bah; go away.
No, it’s gin for me, complicated gin; gin which starts out its life as vodka, but, because it senses the vicissitudes and beauty of the world, forms alliances with juniper and cardamom, angelica and fennel, almond and cumin and seemingly anything else distillers see fit to introduce.
I say seemingly because, since last summer’s initial gin fling, we’ve tried others; we are always intrigued, and I don’t think we’re alone. There something of a gin renaissance going on, a renaissance nicely covered last month in a New York Times article that gets my vote for best headline: No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis. The panel was specifically trying gins based on how they’d taste in a 5:1 gin-to-vermouth martini, and judging them accordingly. The number one pick turned out to be Plymouth Gin, a gin made in the UK in the world’s oldest working gin distillery, and which the Times’ writers described as “Subtle and elegant with crisp, lingering flavors of citrus and juniper.”
I bought a bottle that day. Not because I planned on a martini; while I love them, I love them the way Dorothy Parker loved them, and so take my poison with a lot of ice and a little tonic.
Or so I thought. While I adored the Plymouth, which tasted of deep cold water, and was fragrant with juniper and lemon peel but not distractingly so, I was distracted by the tonic.
“Too sweet,” I said to my husband, who mixed me up a gin & soda with a few shakes of some homemade tonic our buddy had made. Better, much, but still…
The next night, I went straight gin & soda, with a wedge of lime. The night after that, I gave up the lime. Now, I could taste the gin, which is after all, what I’d wanted.
To date, I’ve tried five more gins: Tanqueray London Dry Gin, the British standard-bearer, deeply crisp, with a metallic ting and a big juniper hit. Hendrick’s, from Scotland, clean and with a floral/cucumber quality. Aviation Gin, from Portland, Oregon, with has a soft quality that’s to some people’s taste, if not to mine, and a flavor that always reminds me of wintergreen gum. Broker’s, which I think my husband bought because the bottle wore a bowler hat, and which had a nice, neutral, bold flavor. And a new favorite, from France, Citadelle, which has 19 botanicals and is thus green and wintry and also, and what I need in a gin, extremely crisp. An elegant gin I would be happy to drink every evening.
Except when I am drinking the Plymouth.
Nancy Rommelmann is a columnist and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, Bon Appetit and other publications, and a frequent contributor to Portland Food & Drink. She is the author of several books, including %%AMAZON=014026373X Everything You Pretend to Know About Food And Are Afraid Someone Will Ask,%% and the recently completed memoir, Leaving Los Angeles. Her personal blog can be read here.
If you haven’t tried Bombay Sapphire gin you should. Not just Bombay, but their upper tier called “Sapphire”
Well, that was a nice commercial for Plymouth, wasn’t it.
Try Martin Miller’s Reformed London Dry Gin – Westbourne Strength. Should be along the lines of your style with the Plymouth.
Yeah, Bombay Sapphire makes exceptional Gin and Tonics. It’s a running party favorite with my friends.
Yeah. Martinis. Compared to other drinks, it’s like choosing online news over dead tree media: once you switch you rarely look back.
When I’m enjoying my palate cleanser of choice, it’s Beefeater for me. But when I can get it, I reach for South. Saphire goes damn good with tonic and even tastes good on its own, but I’ve never gotten excited about how it mingles with the vermouth, and that’s coming from someone who likes it very dry. Openly dislike what Tanquery does with vermouth and olive brine.
Plymouth, huh? Hmmm….
I drink only dry gin martinis. Twist of lime or lemon, rarely an olive or baby onion. Here are my fave picks, in rank order:
1. G’vine. Lovely high-end taste, not briney like Bombay Sapphire but not quite as cologne-ey like Tanqueray Ten. I just think it tastes “high-end”; not sure how to explain that.
2. Martin Miller’s Reformed London Dry. This comes in two formulations: silver capped Westbourne Strength (which is the dry one) and a blue capped bottle that is a little too watermelon Jolly Rancher tasting for most martinis but it has its moments.
3. Tanqueray Ten. You can tell you’re in a good bar if you see this stuff, since most average places think they’re doing pretty well if they stock (blech) Bombay Sapphire.
4. Damrack, which is from the Netherlands. Has an odd absinthey note to it.
5. Junipero, from the Anchor Steam people. This is a great, relatively unknown domestic marque, and quite piney and refreshing.
Thanks for all the tips! We’re actually doing something of a gin taste-test this evening, including a new one, also from Portland, called Cricket Club. Will report back.
Bombay Sapphire for me most of the time. I keep it in the freezer and have it on ice. My favorite is Junípero made by Anchor Distilling in San Francisco but I have not seen any in awhile.
When I was very young, enjoyed the Beefeater, then moved on to Tanqueray, never a big fan of Bombay, etc., etc. But have always loved and still return to the Seagram’s. Like it on a hot afternoon with crushed ice, a bit of tonic and a splash of Rose’s Lime Juice, yum! In my young adulthood even flirted with the Vodka..Stoly please.. but even that doesn’t compare to GIN.
What a shame that Tanqueray Malacca is no longer available. I honestly think they took it off the market because it was so good there was no reason to buy Tanq 10.
Recipe for very dry Martini, from, IIRC, The Haphazard Gourmet:
Take gin, shake with ice, pour into Martini glass. Pick up glass, hold near mouth, say “Vermouth” into glass. Drink. Repeat as required.
It looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking martinis.
I remember Tanqueray Malacca! Kind of a garlicky peppery gin with a strange butter/cardamom thing going on. I believe it was one of the Tanqueray distillery’s original recipes from 1848 or so. Great with a bleu cheese olive.
This Churchillian attitude about the vermouth (“glance in the general direction of France” etc.) gets kind of tiresome. Ha friggin’ ha. You need vermouth for a proper martini. If you want a pissing contest you can get on with the hyperbole, but the correct vermouth does very interesting things to gin.
As I wrote in the piece, I do not (often) drink martinis. But perhaps I’ll try one tonight. Proportion of vermouth to gin? 5:1? 8:1?
What follows is one of my special secret techniques for getting the proportion of vermouth to gin correct.
1. Gin lives in the freezer until ready for use. Vermouth is in the fridge.
2. My martinis are neither shaken (which introduces air bubbles into the gin, thus “bruising” it), nor stirred. They are SWIRLED within the shaker with a Vigorous Circular Motion.
3. Fill the shaker with ice cubes. Pour in a shot of vermouth. SHAKE the shaker (remember, this is just vermouth).
4. Pour out the vermouth. Enough vermouth will have frozen to the surface of the ice cubes. Pour in the gin and finish by swirling the frozen gin.
The above technique should give you a martini with the treasured Layer of Ice on top. The shaker can freeze like a canister of liquid nitrogen: do not lick it or you’ll end up like the kid who licked the stop sign in A Christmas Story. It helps to have a leather covered shaker.
If you want more vermouth, experiment with using crushed ice instead of ice cubes. Crushed ice has more surface area for the vermouth to cling to, therefore less will run off when you discard the vermouth. Additionally, you can control the relative proportions by swirling the martini for a longer period of time.
Of course, I mean 5:1 or 8:1 gin-to-vermouth.
Anyway, report on cricket club: huge juniper hit, woody, some sweet fruit mingling around in there. Good.
4:1, and don’t let anyone tell you different. A “dry” (i.e. iced gin) martini tastes like lighter fluid.
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