In Praise of the Martini

It's the perfect drink.

There’s a great scene in the movie Any Given Sunday in which Al Pacino is giving a talk to the football team he coaches. He talks, briefly, about getting older and he points out that when you get older, you lose things.

I’ve lost my ability to drink, really. When younger, I could drink a lot, and a hangover meant I was just a little tired. Not anymore. Hangovers now make me want to kill myself, and they’re accompanied by their good friend and confidante, guilt. But when I look back on the first sixty years of my life, drinking owes me nothing. As my mother would have said, I got the good out of it.

And for my money, the apex of drinking, the absolute peak of the alcoholic beverage, is the classic Martini. This week, a Valentine to the greatest drink of them all.

Drinking is a fascinating pursuit, because it comes with endless options, and people are constantly thinking up new ones. There are, for example, hundreds of different varieties of beer and wine. Lots of restaurants offer their own cocktails. Then, of course, there are hundreds of different drinks ranging from the Grasshopper, which is sort of silly, to the Old-fashioned which, as its name implies, is kind of retro and cool, to the gin and tonic, and its exotic relative the vodka tonic, which to me always mean sunny weather, hot days and a nice, cool glass in your hand.

The Martini stands alone. It’s the drink of adults. It’s the elegant, simple, eternal drink of people who wear suits, who succeed, who are unmoved by social media and endless dumb arguments about politics and fashion and identity politics and whoever’s pissed off about something this week. Martini drinkers have been through the blender drinks and the weird beers and the faddish fascination with elaborate concoctions and settled in on something proven, flawless and solid. They’re all grown up, and the classic Martini is for them.

Thoreau, Emerson and the Transcendentalists believed that genuine truth was above mere logic. The Declaration of Independence similarly held that some truths are self-evident. I believe the same thing applies to the classic Martini – it’s undeniable. It was here before we were born, and will be here after we’ve departed because it’s simply better.

Kirk : Why would a Starfleet admiral ask a 300-year-old frozen man for help? 

Khan : Because I am better.

Kirk : At what? 

Khan : Everything.

First of all, a Martini is beautiful. Made by someone who knows what they’re doing, a Martini is simply a visually lovely object. You can’t say that about a lot of drinks. Nobody would call a glass of beer beautiful, or a margarita. Refreshing, delicious, alcohol-laden, sure. Of course. But people don’t make neon signs and symbols from the shape of a beer mug. They do make them from Martini glasses. Classic, beautiful, timeless – the Martini is the Catherine Deneuve of drinks.

Catherine Deneuve, the Martini of fashion models.

The slender stem, straight and clear, leads to a perfect triangular cone of glass. The beverage it holds is ice-cold and absolutely transparent. Ideally, it’s just above freezing, and there are little flecks of ice floating on top. By the way, if you are a fan of obscenities like the “dirty Martini” please stop reading, unsubscribe from this Substack, and do not ever speak to me again. That isn’t a Martini. It’s a bad joke.

This beautiful drink consists of gin and a little tiny bit of vermouth. It can contain only two additional items – either a twist of lemon, which provides a lovely yellow contrast to the drink and the glass, or an olive, suspended in an angled toothpick, delivering a more organic, friendly note. The lemon peel is citrus – light, bright, a complement to the bite of the gin. The olive is more earthy and solid, and is a contrast rather than dovetailing like lemon does. By the way, if you are into things like stuffing olives with blue cheese, you’re in the same category as the dirty Martini people. I don’t like you.

Martinis are typically served in pretty nice places, which are often beautiful themselves. As an example, one of the very best is the Pied Piper Bar in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It’s an absolutely gorgeous room, and includes a massive Maxfield Parrish mural depicting the bar’s namesake. It’s an appropriately beautiful setting for a beautiful drink.

Now, THAT is a bar.

The Martini is a simple drink, and a pure one. It contains exactly two things, and properly made, 90% of it consists of one challenging kind of booze – gin.

Gin upsets a lot of people. It’s the Richard Avedon of alcohol. It’s beautiful, but it’s also demanding. A lot of people won’t touch it, because they say it drives them crazy. Gin is what helped wreck the British empire.

This was beautifully pointed out in a (relatively) famous pair of engravings done by William Hogarth almost three hundred years ago, in 1751. Admittedly a polemic, Beer Street and Gin Lane present beer as the healthy, life-giving drink of good, decent, hardworking people. Gin, by contrast, causes mothers to abandon their babies, men to turn into human skeletons, and encourages “theft, murder and perjury”. Gin is not to be messed with. Gin requires you to know what you’re doing or, as Hogarth points out, death and ruin await.

Hogarth didn’t think much of gin.

Which brings up the other important thing about Martinis. They will absolutely knock you on your ass. A Martini, in addition to being the Richard Avedon and Catherine Deneuve of drinks, is also the Mike Tyson of drinks. Make that Mike Tyson in a really nice Italian suit, say, one by Canali. I cannot for the life of me imagine the old idea of the three-Martini lunch. I weigh well over 200 pounds and three would make it impossible for me to leave the restaurant, much less get any work done. Martinis are stiff drinks, and demand respect.

The same mother I mentioned earlier was a huge fan of Martinis, and believed that other more complex and contemporary drinks were concoctions intended primarily to disguise the taste of the alcohol in them. For instance, a Margarita has a lot of sugar in it, and fruity stuff. So does a daiquiri. For her money, and mine, all of this is intended to enable people who don’t actually like liquor to get it down the hatch anyway. I think this is the sign of a weak person, someone who’s insincere and untrustworthy.

A Martini, by contrast, makes its intentions clear. This is a straightforward, grown-up, slightly (okay very) old-fashioned drink. It tastes like alcohol because it’s full of it. A Martini is straightforward and honest, and from the very first sip, is direct and to the point. In that, there’s honor, and elegance, and taste.

Speaking of taste, I think you should have one. A bartender will make it using the classic tools – a shaker, ice, and a fair amount of effort. He’ll place it in front of you – make sure you specify that you want it to be very cold, and very dry. If he’s any good, he’ll also place a bowl of nuts. You will sit there, and sip, and wait for the Martini to work its magic, which it will. Don’t rush it. This is a drink to savor. Sip it, think about things, and know that what you’re doing is as beautiful and right and true a thing as the human hand is capable of delivering.

But remember – just one.