Vermouth is a time and a place. At least, it can be, if it is homemade. This fortified, botanically infused aperitif is able to communicate a season, and that season’s feelings and memories, in a way that commercial vermouths cannot. Making your own vermouth is an extraordinarily evocative way to capture where you are. For a few days you become an alchemist, dreamily gathering ingredients and steeping them before becoming sharply focused on blend and balance.
Vermouth can be made anywhere, from any fragrant or flavorful edible plants.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Infusions like vermouth capture minute seasonal changes. Fresh, local botanical flavors have a schedule, and so wherever you live, you will have different plants and a different palette. Feel (very) free to substitute other fresh herbs and flowers, as long as they are edible and have either a good fragrance or flavor. Berries and stone fruits work, too, as do concentrated syrups (instead of sugar) like mulberry, raspberry and elderflower. The finished vermouth is a balance of base notes (for me, always mugwort) and high notes (citrus, some herbs), with a lot of middle ground, filled nicely by spices like juniper, coriander, and fresh bay leaf.
I have made vermouths in different places, at different times of year, and at different personal points in my life. In 2016 it was the unforgettable fragrance of a summer hike through the fynbos of Table Mountain in Cape Town. The vermouth was the clear black tea color of the pure mountain streams, which leach tannins from native plant roots. Those plants infused the vermouth. Then there was Northeast No. 2, whose base was a jarful of Harlem mulberries (the recipe for Northeast No. 1 is in my wild foods cookbook).
I bottled Henri’s Vermouth on the last day of December 2018, a month after my father died, from ingredients I began to gather that day from my mother’s garden, markets, and the mountain: Honeysuckle, helichrysum, African wormwood, confetti bush, pelargoniums, and the ripe, dark fruit of Cape sumach and blackberries.
In Chamonix in 2019 it was a dizzy June vermouth, assembled from mountain slopes and meadows (sweet woodruff, mugwort, Alpine strawberries) in an absorbing blur of botanical happiness, blended in a tiny kitchen with a sliver of Mont Blanc and a daisy-studded lawn beyond the window.
