Vermouths, bitters, fruit liqueurs – retro mixers are just the thing for a festive cocktail
A sniff of vermouth will always make me think of Christmas. It’s a nostalgic thing: a drop of one of the big brands of herb and spice-infused fortified wines, mixed liberally with R Whites lemonade, was the tipple that my usually abstemious elderly female relatives preferred at the one time of the year they allowed themselves a drink.
Each aunt or grandmother had a preference, and coming across various hip young bar-tending things talking up each of them in turn – Cinzano, Martini, or the vermouth-based, quinine-laced aperitif Dubonnet – has been one of the more amusing features of vermouth’s reinvention as a fashionable drink in recent years.
Continue reading...