Cocktail Week: The Martinez
To celebrate November (and an excuse to get the BF to make drinks), I’m going to post one cocktail a day for this whole week.
To start us off is The Martinez, which is supposedly the precursor to the ubiquitous martini. From just the color of this drink, you’d never guess it was related to 007’s drink of choice at all, would you? Other than the gin, it also tastes completely different from a martini.
While I do like all of the ingredients (maybe not the gin so much), this is certainly the case where the drink is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s thick without being syrupy, warming, slightly sweet, slightly bitter, and complex.
Recipe (via art of drink):
1 oz Plymouth Gin
2 oz Sweet Vermouth
1 Dash Angostura Bitters
2 Dash Maraschino
BTW, the bitters are a modern reproduction of Boker’s Bitters by Adam Elmegirab:
http://bokersbitters.co.uk/products.html
quite a bit different from Angostura (and more literally “bitter” than most “bitters” available now).
We don’t have any Old Tom style gin, but I think it was sweet enough with the 2:1 sweet vermouth to gin ratio (other people make this drink with the ratios reversed).
I’ll try that tonight – thanks!