Category: vermouth

This summer I visited Turin and Pessione Italy with Martini vermouth. The distillery hosts the Martini visitors' center and museum, and in this post you can read about how Martini vermouths are made. 

On one particularly lovely day, our group piled into cars and drove around the countryside to see the local herbs used to make the vermouth. 

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We turned off into one field where we saw many local herbs growing: a few varieties of wormwood, chamomille, cilantro, and the very aromatic local peppermint. 

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Then we stopped into a farm cooperative where Martini sources many of the botanicals for the vermouth.  Helpfully they set out fresh and dried herbs that go into the vermouth, so I snapped shots. In the case where I found both the dry and the fresh version of the herb, I've put them together in the image- click the thumbnail to expand. 

 Artemisia Absinthim: They grow three types of wormwood locally.

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Artemisia Pontica (Roman wormwood):

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Artemisia Valesiaca:

Artemisia Volgare (Mugwort):
 

 Roman Chamomille:

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Gentian Root, Gentian Flowers:

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Iperico (St. John's Wort):

Hyssop:
 

 Melissa (Lemon Balm)

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Menta Piperita. This is the highly-aromatic local peppermint. 

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Santoreggia (Savory):

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 Tarassaco (Dandelion):

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 Salvia Sclarea (Clary)

Hopefully that will be a useful guide to some herbs used in vermouth and other drinkables. 

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How Martini & Rossi Vermouth is Made: A Trip to Pessione, Italy

This summer I took a trip to Pessione, Italy, the home of Martini vermouth. Pessione is a small town just outside of the city of Turin, in the northwestern part of Italy. 

The distillery site was chosen as it is close the the railroad, though it is also close to both wine-growing and herb-growing regions. At the distillery, they produce not just vermouths, but also a range of sparkling wines. 

They also produce more than that: 17 wine-based products and 12 spirits are made at the distillery altogether. But we were there to talk about vermouth. 

Luckily, a series of signs made it easy to understand and explain.

Martini vermouths are a combination of wine, fortifying alcohol, herbs in the form of extracts and distillates, sugar, and coloring caramel for certain products. Then the vermouth is cold filtered. 

The secret, of course, is in the combination of herbs, spices, flowers, roots, and bark that go into each type of vermouth.

These get into the vermouth either in the form of distillates (they are added to alcohol and distilled), or extracts (they are infused into alcohol).

Seventy percent of the botanicals used for the vermouths come from a local cooperative that we visited. 

They have a lot of funky looking stills in the distillery. Click on the thumbnails below to see a few different ones.  

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To make extracts, they use rotary extractors. As you'll see in the chart below, some extracts are aged afterward. 

In the new Gran Lusso vermouth, one of the extracts was aged for 8 years. 

The extracts, distillates, wine, sugar, and caramel coloring (if used) are combined in gargantuan stainless steel tanks to blend. They are added in a certain order so that materials won't precipitate out of solution.

These resting rooms hold 5.6 million liters of vermouth on-site.

After blending, it's a 20 day process until bottling. They let the blend rest so that some stuff does precipitate out, then cold filter it, then bottle. 

(Filtration nerd bonus: They use both .65 micron cellulose filters and diatomaceous earth to filter the wine).

Every day they make 400,000 liters of Martini vermouth in this facility. 

In the next post, we'll look at some of the locally-grown herbs used to make Martini. 

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(Re)Introducing Noilly Prat Extra Dry Vermouth

Last year I had the pleasure of visiting the Noilly Prat vermoutherie in Marseillan, France, where I learned about how it is made.

Shortly after the visit, I wrote a blog post about the differences between Noilly Prat Dry (aka Original Dry), Noilly Prat Ambre, and Noilly Prat Rouge.

It took a year, but they are finally releasing Noilly Prat Extra Dry on the US Market nationally, so now I'll explain the difference and Extra Dry and Original Dry.  

From 1979 until 2009, the dry vermouth from Noilly Prat sold on the US market was called "French Dry Vermouth". It was different than the version sold in the rest of the world.

In 2009 they replaced this bottling with Original Dry, which was the version of Noilly Prat sold in the rest of the world.

Starting this summer, the former US version "French Dry Vermouth" will be called "Extra-Dry" and the Original Dry will also still be sold.  So:

Original Dry = International Version

Extra Dry = US Version that was sold until 2009 and is now back on the market.

There are four production differences between Original Dry and Extra-Dry. In order to best understand them, it might be helpful to read about how Noilly Prat is made in general. Then read the below. 

Differences between Noilly Prat Original Dry and Extra-Dry

• Extra-Dry uses only clairette wine while Original Dry uses a combintation of clairette and picpoul. This is because clairette oxidizes less. 
• Extra-Dry uses less of the sweet mistelle wine, so it is, in fact, drier.
• Both Original Dry and Extra-Dry use the same 20 herbs and spices, but in different ratios. 
• The wine for both Original Dry and Extra Dry is aged outdoors for one year, but after infusing that wine with herbs and spices, the Original Dry is aged an additional 6 weeks to 3 months. Extra Dry is bottled without this extra aging step. 

Extra Dry tastes fruitier than the dry, and less woody. It is also clear as opposed to lightly yellow, and clearly intended for use as a mixer in Martinis and other cocktails. Original Dry can be mixed into cocktails or consumed on its own as an aperitif. 

Hopefully soon both Original and Extra Dry will on store shelves again so you can compare the two side-by-side.

Noilly Prat Rouge is still on the market, and Noilly Prat Ambre will soon be available in major US cities.

Below are a few pictures from my visit.

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Related articles

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In yesterday's post I discussed how Noilly Prat vermouth is made, as learned on my visit to the vermoutherie in Marseillan, France. Today I want to talk about the differences between the types of vermouth they make. 

In most parts of the world, Original Dry is the only Noilly Prat. The Rouge is primarily for the US market, and the Ambre is available in a few liquor stores in Europe and at the distillery. (The Rouge is also available at the distillery.) 

Noilly Prat Original Dry

One-year-aged clairette and picpoul wines, aged, fortified sweet mistelle wine the from muscat grape, a raspberry and lemon-infused distillate are combined and infused wtih herbs and spices. The filtered results of this are then aged for three more weeks. 

The Original Dry is macerated with 20 ingredients. These include: 

• Chamomille. This is the dominant note. As a delicate dried flower, this maceration is done separately from the main maceration. Chamomille gives the vermouth both a slight bitterness and the dry finish. 
• Nutmeg.
• Bitter orange peels from Tunisia. 
• Gentian. This adds bitter and earthy notes. Gentian is used in gin and many perfumes to add base notes. 
• Wormwood. By European law, all vermouth contains wormwood. The word "vermouth" actually comes from the German word for wormwood.

Noilly Prat Rouge

This is Noilly Prat's sweet vermouth, which was created in 1956. It uses the same base wines, but also includes caramel coloring to give it its red hue. (Many people assume sweet vermouths are made from red wines- nope!) The Rouge calls for the same 20 ingredients as the Original Dry, but used in different ratios than the dry. It then adds an additional 5 ingredients not found in the Original Dry, for 25 ingredients in total. These ingredients include:

• Cloves
• Coco beans from Venezuela
• Saffron
• Quinine (like in tonic water)

Noilly Prat Ambre

This is basically a special 'distillery edition' of vermouth, only available here and in a few important wine shops in Europe. It is amber in color and much sweeter than the Original Dry- in fact sweeter than the Rouge. It contains all of the 25 herbs and spices used in Rouge, plus 24 additional ingredients, for a total of 49 herbs and spices. These include:

• Cardamom
• Lavender
• Cinnamon
• Rose petals
• Vanilla

There is also an Extra-Dry coming to the US market this fall, but I'll save that for another post… Update! Here is a post about the Extra-Dry vermouth. 

Though vermouth as an essential ingredient in cocktails, I never gave much though to its production, figuring it was just a simple infusion of herbs in fortified wine. It turns out there is a lot more to it than that. 

This June I visited Marseillan, France, the home of Noilly Prat vermouth. There, it is pronounced "No-ah-lee Pra" or "No-ah-lee Praht". 

This brand is considered the first commercial dry-style vermouth in the world, dating to 1813. The recipe was created then in Marseilles by Joseph Noilly. His son moved production to Marseillan in 1850 and his when his grandson-in-law joined the company it became Noilly Prat. In the early 1970s Noilly Prat was purchased by Martini & Rossi, and that company was purchased by Bacardi in the early 1990s. 

Marseillan is a small fishing town in the Southeast of France, located near the vineyards of the Languedoc region, which abut the oyster farms separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a small strip of land. Not coincidentally, Noilly Prat Dry is served with oysters in the region, and oysters are served everywhere.

Vermouth is a fortified, aromatized wine. So let's get into how it is made. 

The Wines in Noilly Prat

Three kinds of wine go into Noilly Prat Original Dry: Picpoul, Clairette, and muscat for the sweetening mistelle. Many of the wines are grown next to the ocean Mediterranean Sea, adjacent to the oyster farms. What grows together, goes together. 

Those rows of things in the water beyond the vines are oyster tables

Picpoul is an AOC wine in the area, smelling and tasting citrusy and a little tart. It too pairs with the local seafood. It makes up 60 percent of the wine in Noilly Prat. 

Clairette, making up the other 40% of the wine blend in Noilly Prat, is less acidic than picpoul. It is fruitier and less citrusy than picpoul.

These wines are usually harvested in September. Noilly Prat doesn't own the vineyards but purchases them from local cooperatives. In fact, they buy wines, not the grapes themselves. The wines are 12.5 to 14 percent alcohol by volume, and not aged in oak (yet).

The Mistelle is the sweetening agent for Noilly Prat. Is is made from the partially fermented muscat grape juice. Fermentation is stopped by adding spirit (neutral sugar beet spirit) before it fully completes, leaving the wine very sweet at around 100 grams per liter sugar content. 

The room where the mistelle ages is filled with huge vats. It dates back to around 1850. The vats were so big they were installed first, and then the building was built around them. In this room the mistelle ages for a year. 

Aging The Wines

In the olden days,wines would have been sent out on boats to their destinations, aging in barrels along the way. However with faster transportation the wine was not the same. So Noilly Prat began replicating the aging step with their unique method called L'Enclos. 

Behind the front building at the Maison of Noilly Prat is a courtyard, and in this courtyard are 2,000 barrels where the picpoul and clairette wines age separately outdoors for a full year, oxidizing and taking on aspects of the salty sea air. 

The barrels are watered regularly to minimize evaporation of the wine

Before aging these wines are fortified (with neutral sugar beet distillate) to 18 percent for picpoul and 16 percent for the clairette. We sampled wines aged about 6 months from the barrels – the picpoul wine still tasted very citrusy (apparently picpoul means something like "lip stinger") but took on an oxidized smell that reminded me of flan. The Clairette also tasted oxidized and quite salty, reminded me a little bit of manzanilla sherry.

All the wine for Noilly Prat ages in this one courtyard, though they have more room in other courtyards should we start drinking more vermouth.

The barrels used are all more than 30 years old, some of them more than 100 years old. I believe they said they purchase them from scotch whisky distilleries, but they didn't look to me like ex-bourbon barrels but ex-sherry butts and ex-port pipes as they were all larger than the typical 55 gallon barrels of bourbon.  

As the barrels are so old (thus quite neutral and won't lend woody characteristics to the wine), there is a cooperage repair shop on site, located in a building where they used to distill absinthe. 

In the cooperage. That staircase? Designed by a guy named Eiffel.

Infusing the Vermouth, and One Last Aging 

Indoors in the Vermoutherie, the aged wines and aged mistelle are transferred here. Another distillate now comes into the equation: Lemon peels and raspberries are macerated in neutral sugar beet spirit for one week and then redistilled in a pot still to 76 percent alcohol. This flavored distillate is then used to further fortify the wine.

Pot still of the same kind used to make the lemon-raspberry flavored distillate.

In 2050 liter oval pine wood vats, the aged picpoul, clairette, and mistelle, plus the flavored distillate, are infused with the custom blend of herbs and spices for three weeks. 

Every day during this period a person stirs the macerating wine for two minutes with a special sickle-shaped tool for the purpose. 

Stirring the macerating herbs

After maceration, the vermouth is filtered in a big rotary filter to remove the herb particles. The vermouth is then further aged 3 more months in the same sized vats that hold the mistelle. 

In tomorrow's post, I'll discuss the different herbs and spices (plus a few other production differences) used in Noilly Prat Original Dry, Rouge, and Ambre. 

But I hope this post makes it clear that producing vermouth (at least this vermouth) is no simple business. I no longer just twist open a bottle and dump it into my cocktails- I now pour a bit into a glass with a single ice cube and savor it on its own first. Props.

Next Up: Read about the differences between Noilly Prat Original Dry, Rouge, and Ambre. 

Then read about the new Extra Dry on the US market in summer 2013 and the difference between Original Dry and Extra Dry.