Lockdown cocktails week 8: It's National Martini Day!

There was really no choice about today’s cocktail - it’s national martini day and we’re going for a classic martini. This is the easiest cocktail of all: two ingredients, dry vermouth and gin (only use vodka if you prefer your drinks tasteless), stir with ice and pour. Martinis are traditionally garnished with lemon peel or olives but this is just to look pretty - you really don’t need anything to enhance the flavour.

It’s common nowadays to call any strong cocktail that’s served in a martini glass some kind of martini (see our Bashall Brunch Martini from earlier in this series), but a traditional martini never has anything but gin and vermouth in - plus perhaps a little olive brine if that’s your taste.

The proportions of gin and vermouth are up to you. Seasoned drinkers prefer very little vermouth - Noël Coward would waft his glass of gin in the direction of Italy (where vermouth generally comes from) and Winston Churchill would allow a ray of sun to shine through the vermouth bottle into his gin - but I prefer a mixture that’s around one part vermouth to four parts gin.

Unless you’re James Bond, you should always stir a martini, never shake it. As Somerset Maugham said “a martini should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of one another". The reason people sometimes like to shake it with ice is because it makes a colder drink. But ice coldness in a drink kills the flavours, so stirring it with ice produces a cold but not icy drink, allowing the botanicals to come through.

Given the minimal flavours, a martini is a chance to let a good gin shine. I’m a traditionalist, so I would always make this with our London Dry and really savour the subtle flavours of the botanicals. We also tried our Orange & Quince which works really well - it’s juniper-forward, so the underlying botanicals still shine, but it adds a bit more background flavour and freshness to the cocktail.

Bottoms up!

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.