The Wines That Made Us (8): Martini

Martini is a mystery. It's one of the most familiar brands in the world, it's given its name to the most famous of all cocktail drinks, for some of us it still rings a distant answering bell as the quintessence of a certain kind of Eurotrash High Life, but how often have I ever drunk the stuff? How often have you? I mean, it's culturally ubiquitous but at the same time invisible. Just last weekend I made some - though I say so myself - killer Dry Martinis. The gin was Silent Pool (terrific) and the vermouth was Dolin (ditto). Plus a twist of lemon, not an olive, that's the way I roll. But not a drop of actual Martini. Maybe I should have announced these beverages as old-fashioned Gin & Frenchies but does anyone do that these days? And why do I feel no compunction at all about not using original Martini vermouth?

A five-minute trawl of Google reveals not much about the business behind the drink - Martini & Rossi - except the unsurprising truth that Martini began as an Italian vermouth company in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching the New York market in the late 1860s. The first Dry Martini cocktail arrived, probably in New York, at the start of the twentieth century - although the drink's name may actually be a corruption of Martinez, the guy who first mixed gin and vermouth together. Since then, interest has mostly swirled around the exact ratio of vermouth to gin, plus whatever interventions (brine for a Dirty Martini; olive or twist; vermouth mixtures, like two-stroke petrol; ice or no ice) the mixer may or may not be keen on. I am not much better off for knowing this.

So I go out and buy a whole litre of the stuff, in a blousy screwtop bottle slathered in Martini-isms and try it out. I know I've drunk it before, somewhere, but a kind of guilt obliges me to get the taste authentically, here and now. It's the Bianco, the one you're supposed to take long, with a mixer, or as it comes, with a lump of ice. I pick the latter, try and few mouthfuls and, yes, there are botanicals swirling around, plus an aromatic headiness, not necessarily in a good way, more like stale perfume on a cashmere sweater, but I suppose there might be times when that's the experience I might crave, plus a tough terminal coating on the back teeth. The label suggests drinking it long with tonic water but it's already sticky and sugary enough as it is and anyway, if I want to drink Sprite, I can. And now I have 90cl of Martini Bianco bulging away on the liquor tray and I can foresee the awful stuff going with me to the grave, endlessly undrunk, brassily insistent, and I paid £10 for it, on offer.

So it's not the taste and it never has been the taste. Which only leaves one thing to account for its bothersome presence in my mind and indeed in the mind of PK and others of our generation: the adverts. You know what I'm talking about, they're all over YouTube, It's the left one...it's the right one...it's Martini, we used to sing, back in the Seventies. Somehow these ads appropriated a particular iconography all for themselves - the Mediterranean sunlight, the fancy blondes, the fast cars, the megalithic tumblers chinking in close-up, the James Hunt costumed morons leering at the controls of a speedboat, the promise of a brown fortified wine to set your day straight. No-one else came close. And when this cataclysm of kitsch wasn't blaring at us in the cinemas we had it silently reproduced in full-colour magazine ads, a kind of top-up before the next time we went out to watch Diamonds Are Forever or Shaft. And yet - adverts and motor racing sponsorship: is that really all it came down to?

The answer has to be yes: so far as I can see, no encounter with basic, raw, Martini is ever going to be anything other than puzzling and inconsequential. Trouble is, I can't think of anything else - even allowing for the intercessions of time and senility - whose essence has been so mediated by the publicity that went with it - that exists, basically, as a thing advertised rather than as a thing. David Bowie? National Savings Certifcates? NATO? Fondue? Quadrophonic hi-fi? Any time, any place, anywhere...There's a wonderful world you can share... I'm wondering, could we just leave it at that? Keep these imperishable sentiments without having to tangle with the vermouth? On this occasion, isn't the advertising the thing with the real value?

CJ