If you’re a Manhattan or Negroni drinker, you don’t need to be told that the vermouth used in either should be just as good as the other ingredients. And for as long as recent memory can remember, the benchmark for sweet vermouth has been Carpano Antica. But that’s changing, and Northern California has been leading the way.
It’s an unassailable fact that Italian distiller Antonio Benedetto Carpano invented modern red vermouth in Turin, Italy, in 1786. The story goes that he believed the women of Turin didn’t like the local red wines, so he created a red-colored wine that they would. Combining herbs and spices with local white wine, he added a bittering agent (wormwood), colored it with caramel and named it after that bittering agent: wermut.
That word, often rendered as “vermut,” literally means “wormwood” in German. And in French, the pronunciation further becomes vermouth. This product with its German/French name would ultimately come to be known as “Italian” vermouth.
Ironically, the product that Carpano invented in 1786 is not the modern Antica version. Antica was created in the late 1990s as a separate variation. The Carpano family’s flagship product after the original vermouth — for nearly 100 years — was Punt E Mes, another more bitter vermouth.
In 2001, Fratelli Branca Distillerie in Milan bought the company. Fratelli might be best known around here for making Fernet Branca. And since then, Antica has dominated the red vermouth market, at l.