The One Drink and the No-Drink
Red Room Martini: Pink Pepper Belongs in the Vermouth
A quarter ounce of pomegranate cordial in a martini is doing color work, not flavor work. That is fine, as long as you know it and stop expecting the drink to taste like pomegranate.
Serve alongside
Jamón, salted Marcona almonds, and a scattering of pomegranate seeds. Fino means this is a Spanish drink whatever the pomegranate implies, and the plate should follow the sherry.
Tools
Mixing glass, bar spoon, julep strainer, a Nick and Nora, and something to crack peppercorns with — the flat of a knife, the bottom of a mug, whatever is nearest. A grinder makes them too fine.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
London dry gin, fino sherry (manzanilla), dry vermouth, pomegranate cordial (grenadine you made yourself, not the red one from the soda aisle), orange bitters, saline solution, pink peppercorns, lemon
Magic
Move the pink pepper off the garnish and into the vermouth. Crack 12 peppercorns, drop them into 3 oz of dry vermouth in a jar, wait 20 minutes, strain. Pink peppercorns are not pepper — they are dried berries from a tree in the cashew family, and they are fruity and faintly piney rather than hot. As a garnish they are three specks doing almost nothing. Steeped into the vermouth, they run through the whole drink and pick up the pomegranate on the way past. Not feeling brave? Crack four over the surface just before serving, so at least somebody smells them.
Gotcha
Twenty minutes, then strain. At thirty-plus the berries give up their resin and the vermouth turns piney and slightly soapy — it goes from fruit to furniture polish and it does not come back. Second thing, and it matters more: pink peppercorns come from a cashew relative, and people with tree-nut allergies can react to them. Say what is in the drink before you hand it over.
A quarter ounce of pomegranate cordial in a two-and-a-half-ounce stirred drink is doing color work, not flavor work. That is a legitimate thing for an ingredient to do and there is no shame in it, but it is worth being honest about, because the alternative is the very common experience of tasting a beautiful pale-red martini and thinking, with mild disappointment, that you cannot really find the pomegranate. You cannot. It is not there in that quantity. What it is doing is turning a clear drink the color of the inside of a grapefruit, and making the fino taste one shade rounder than it would alone.
The build
- 1 1/2 oz London dry gin
- 3/4 oz fino sherry
- 1/2 oz dry vermouth
- 1/4 oz pomegranate cordial
- 2 dashes orange bitters
- 2 drops saline
- Pink peppercorn and lemon peel
The pour, drawn to scale
- London dry gin1 1/2 oz50%
- fino sherry3/4 oz25%
- dry vermouth1/2 oz17%
- pomegranate cordial1/4 oz8%
Method
Stir all liquid ingredients with ice for 25 seconds.
Strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass.
Garnish: express lemon peel and garnish with a few pink peppercorns. Float them; they are light enough to sit on the surface, which is where you want them, since anything below the meniscus is decoration nobody can smell.
What the fino is actually for
Three quarters of an ounce of fino is the largest non-gin pour in this drink and it is the reason the whole thing works. Fino is aged under a living layer of yeast, which keeps oxygen off it and gives it that dry, almond, faintly briny character — it reads as salt and structure rather than as wine. Against gin it does what a very good dry vermouth does, but flatter and saltier, which is precisely the counterweight a fruit cordial needs.
The catch is that fino is fragile. Once opened it has about a week in the fridge before the flor character fades and it goes nutty and dull, and in a drink this spare you will taste the difference immediately. Buy half bottles. It is one of the few times where the smaller bottle is the cheaper decision.
Making the cordial
Pomegranate juice reduced by half with an equal weight of sugar, cooled, and finished with a squeeze of lemon. Do not skip the lemon — bottled pomegranate juice is pasteurized and pasteurizing dulls the acid, so the cordial comes out sweet and heavy without it.
The commercial red syrup in the soda aisle is not this and never was. It is corn syrup, red dye, and a citric-acid tang, and in a drink with two ounces of dry fortified wine in it, it announces itself the way a car alarm announces itself.
Glass, and no ice at all
Nick and Nora, straight from the freezer. Nothing in the glass but the drink. Twenty-five seconds of stirring is where all the water comes from and that is the design — a small, cold, five-ounce glass that gets finished before it warms, rather than a large one that has to be defended.
Six at once
Combine with 20 percent chilled water up to one day ahead. Use the pink-pepper vermouth in the batch; a 20-minute steep scales without changing, and a jar of infused vermouth is easier to make once than six times.
Peppercorns and peel at the glass. Six frozen Nick and Noras will not fit in most freezers, so put them in the fridge two hours ahead and rinse each one with a splash of the batch before you pour — it costs you a quarter ounce and it gets the glass genuinely cold.
Without the gin
Fino is the hard part, not the gin, because nothing zero-proof does that yeast-and-salt thing. The closest honest version: 1 1/2 oz nonalcoholic juniper spirit, 3/4 oz of a dry dealcoholized white with 3 extra drops of saline, 1/2 oz dealcoholized white in place of the vermouth with the pink pepper steeped into it, and the cordial and bitters as written. Stir 15 seconds. It is a good drink and it is not this drink, and I would rather say that than pretend.
Marcona almonds. Anything with salt and fat. Fino was made to be drunk with food and it does not stop wanting it just because there is gin in the glass.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
Where this goes next
