Category — Martinis

While there’s always a place for intricate cocktails boasting fun ingredients like Benedictine, Orgeat or Maraschino liqueur, sometimes you just want to simplify your life and your drinks.

Comprised of five simple ingredients found in any reasonably stocked home bar, the Bronx Cocktail is basically a perfect martini with orange juice added.  It’s a classic, pre-prohibition cocktail that’s a bit fruity—but not overly sweet—and its base spirit, gin, is a good carrier for both the sweet and dry vermouth.

This innocuous looking cocktail packs quite a punch, and the addition of OJ makes it a healthy alternative to not drinking cocktails.

Ingredients:

2 ounces gin
1/4 oz sweet vermouth
1/4 oz dry vermouth
1 ounce orange juice
1 dash orange bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.

For a visual on how to craft the Bronx Cocktail, here’s a quick instructional video from Dave Harrison of Lush Life Productions – The Bronx Cocktail in 12 Seconds.

Many cocktails have predecessors, but perhaps none was quite as important as the under appreciated Martinez, a gin and sweet vermouth concoction that helped pave the way for the ubiquitous martini.

As with many cocktails, origins of the Martinez are a hazy mess of conflicting stories.  Some say it was created by a gent named Martinez, while others claim it was crafted by famed bartender Jerry Thomas for a fellow traveling to Martinez, California.  Both sound reasonable enough to me, but whatever its origins, it’s another good excuse to combine gin and maraschino liqueur, which work well in drinks like the Aviation and Last Word.

Proportions for the Martinez vary greatly, with some calling for a 2:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, and others calling for the opposite.  I tried a few different variations before settling on the one below, which offers plenty of sweetness but enough gin to maintain its integrity.  Orange bitters worked pretty well in place of Angostura, but I preferred the latter.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 ounces gin
1 ounce sweet vermouth
1/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice in a mixing glass, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

The martini is one of the world’s best known and most popular cocktails, having been immortalized by such drinking greats as Winston Churchill, James Bond and Frank Sinatra.  However, nowadays, half the martinis made in a bar use vodka instead of gin, totally exclude vermouth, are shaken like hell rather than stirred and owe most of their flavor to olive juice.  A tragedy indeed.

As vodka is a flavorless spirit, and olive juice tastes like, well, olive juice, this poor beverage has become a bastardized victim, a shell of its former self unable to live up to its potential.

If you want to taste what a martini is supposed to taste like, use a good gin (Plymouth always treats me right) and a solid vermouth like Noilly Prat.  Since the vermouth balances out the gin and is very important to the flavor profile of the drink, I like to use three parts gin to one part vermouth.

A lesser known but classic addition to the martini is orange bitters.  Add two dashes of Regan’s #6, Angostura Orange or Fee Brothers for a nice touch of orange that blends perfectly with the other ingredients.

Ingredients:

3 parts gin
1 part dry vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Directions:

Stir (seriously, don’t shake it. Cocktails made with all spirits are meant to be stirred) all ingredients with ice until cold.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Skip the olives and twist a strip of lemon over the top to release its oils.  Drop it in, if you’d like, and enjoy.

The Vesper Martini was first popularized in the James Bond book by Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, and gained further, more recent notoriety in the 2006 film of the same name.  The drink was named for Bond’s love interest Vesper Lynd, and showing much fondness for the drink, Fleming’s Bond recited the full recipe for a bartender.

Unlike the traditional martini’s dry vermouth, the Vesper calls for Lillet, a quinine aperitif that is smoother and sweeter than most dry vermouths. Plus, the addition of vodka to the cocktail complements the gin by smoothing out some of its sharpness. The result is a mellow, tasty martini that’s a bit more interesting and flavorful than the traditional fare.

Ingredients:

3 ounces London dry gin
1 ounce vodka
1/2 ounce Lillet Blanc

Directions:

Stir, don’t shake, all ingredients with cracked ice until cold and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Twist a lemon peel over the drink to spray its oils onto the surface of the martini, then drop it in.