Anyway, Martini, the stuff with the bright young things, like Cinzano is just a branded vermouth and, as so often, we Britons think of something Italian when we think of Mediterranean staples. Vermouth is, basically a wine with various herbs, spices, barks and plant extracts added to give it a particular taste. Wikipedia tells me the name originates from the German word wermut which means wormwood and wormwood is used in nearly all vermouth to give it that particular flavour.
So, years ago, in a Spanish evening class, the teacher told us that most bars in Spain did their own vermouth. My guess is that slapping in a few herbs and roots and bits of bark into rough wine is a way to hide its true taste. Nowadays, when the bars and restaurants want to offload the same sort of plonk they simply put it in the fridge. So, all those years ago, I'm in a raggedy bar in Granada with lots of rickety chairs on the dusty forecourt cum car park. I remember this factlet about homemade vermouth from the evening class. I ask if they serve vermut. They do. The barkeeper produces a well used, cork stoppered, white wine bottle from underneath the bar and pours me a generous measure. I forget what it tasted like.
Thirty something years later I'm in Granada again and I remember that bar. On my first visit it was the sort of place with toothless, domino playing old men smoking Ducados. By the second decade of the 21st Century the bar had been trendied up so that it looked even more traditionally Spanish. I was surprised there was no guitar player and no horse parked outside. The bar was full of tourists who had read about the place in their Lonely Planet guides. The vermouth bottle had a nice label.
Vermouth didn't really cross my path again till we settled in Culebrón. One of our first tasks was to investigate the local bodegas, the places that produce and sell wine. Most of them had a vermouth and all of them tasted slightly different. Obviously it was our cultural duty to investigate the differences and we did so with due diligence. When the novelty wore off, and the morning after consequences became unacceptable, Maggie went back to unsullied wine and I divided my time between tea and beer.
Vermouth resurfaced again, for us, some years ago when our local Culebrón village fiesta advertised a vermouth session as the opening event for the weekend. Roberto, from the village bodega, brought a few litres of vermouth to the social centre and we all set around drinking it. Vermouth can be taken with or without soda water, sifón, but definitely with ice, orange slices and green olives. A little later, when the Socialists won the town elections, in 2011, they changed the character of the town fiestas to be more participative (take that as personal opinion rather than demonstrable fact). Among other things they introduced a vermouth session in the municipal gardens just before lunch. I presumed it was a well established Spanish tradition and I applied myself, once more, to this cultural activity with British rigour.
Vermouth hour, la hora del vermut, really is a Spanish social tradition; a time for friends and family (and presumably enemies and complete strangers) to have a bit of a preprandial drink. It's quite odd, as I was drafting this post there was an author on the radio talking about his book and about the book fair that is on in Madrid at the moment. When the interviewer asked the writer when he was signing he said he was working la hora del vermut.
The idea of having an aperitif before eating is hardly uniquely Spanish, lots of countries do it, but, in most countries it's an evening rather than an afternoon tradition. Apparently there are two principal theories as to why Spain is different. The first has it that before the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Spaniards did as most of the rest of Europe and had an aperitif before the evening meal but, after the war, people were often so hard up that they needed two jobs to get by. This prompted a change in working patterns with people combining a morning shift with an afternoon/evening shift. The late evening finish relegated the evening meal to being more akin to a snack than a full blown meal and the main meal of the day shifted to the time between the finish of the morning job and the start of the afternoon/evening job. This change not only affected the hora del vermut but also radically arranged the Spanish working day. The second, and much more widely accepted theory, is that the hora del vermut was originally something that rich people did in the slot between finishing mass on Sunday and eating lunch. As the Spanish economy grew, and a middle class began to develop, one of the first luxuries that this new class could afford, one of the few habits of the rich that they could easily copy, was to have a bit of a tipple before Sunday lunch. And it's easy to see that developing into a daily routine.
Whilst the original drink for the preprandial was vermouth tastes began to change and people tended to other drinks to "open their appetite" maybe a beer, maybe a wine. As the habits changed the name didn't. Just as people in the UK may have coffee at teatime or tea at coffee break the name, hora del vermut, stuck to describe this pre-lunch drink. At the end of the last century vermut was relegated to a very secondary place in Spanish drinking habits but recently there has been a bit of a resurgence and there are now lots of craft vermouths and even specialist vermouth bars. Some of these vermuterias offer drinks that bear only a passing resemblance to traditional vermouth - things like cider or gin laced with those "botanic" ingredients.
We're still waiting for our first vermuteria in Pinoso but in the meantime I think it's beholden to all of us to embrace the traditions of our new home and do what we can to promote this age old custom!
