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ESPERANZA PELÁEZ
Friday, 15 December 2017, 13:58
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Old classics never die and vermouth, which has never really gone out of fashion in some places in Spain such as Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, is making a comeback as a fashionable drink. But what is vermouth?
Well it is just a wine (traditionally from green grapes), flavoured with spices and strengthened with alcohol. Spicy wines such as this have a long history; they were drunk in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and continued to be popular right into the Middle Ages.
Their popularity was probably because wine then was not like we know it today and sweetening it with honey and added spices helped to disguise the flavour.
It was not until the late eighteenth century that a Turin resident, Antonio Benedetto Carpano, was inspired by a German medicinal wine flavoured with wormwood from which he created a recipe for a drink that would take its name from the German word for wormwood-flavoured wine, 'wermut'.
In Malaga, three wineries: Dimobe, the Antigua Casa de Guardia and Málaga Virgen, make vermouths.
Unlike other places where dry wines are used, here, thanks to the tradition of making sweet wine, sweet moscatel and PX based wines are used which decreases the amount of sugar added at the end of the process. However, with the current trend for less-sweet wines sometimes no sugar is added at all. The density of the sweet Malaga wines help to slow down the melting rate of ice so the drink retains its full flavour longer.
The Antigua Casa de Guardia has been in the Alameda Principal since 1898 and the barrel vermouth is one of its star products. Here it is served in a narrow glass with ice and lemon rind. It can accompany almost any meal and is a popular addition to cocktails.
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