To quote:
... It’s come to my attention that some people believe martinis are made with vodka. I hate to get snobbish about it, but a martini should be made with gin or it’s not a martini. Call it a vodkatini if you must, but not a martini. Gin and vodka have as much in common hierarchically as a president and a vice president. Vodka can fill in for gin from time to time and might even be given certain ceremonial duties of its own, but at important moments you need the real thing. Vodka generally makes a poor substitute for gin in a martini or any other gin cocktail.
The panel found common ground here. Each of us is partial to the classic martini made with gin, although Audrey was sensitive to the desires of her clientele.
“You have to revisit which generation is drinking the martini,” she said. “We might be classicists, but is the newer generation?”
Still, after perhaps 8 or 10 martinis, Audrey fessed up, referring at one point to “a generation lobotomized by vodka.”
Indeed, gin is more of a thinking person’s spirit. Vodka is neutral in aroma and flavor, which is also how gin begins life. But where vodka stays neutral, gin is infused with botanicals — a witch’s pantry of roots, berries, herbs, dried fruits and spices — dominated by the piney, breezy aroma of juniper berries. Other common botanicals include angelica, cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, lemon peel, licorice, fennel and ginger. It is the closely guarded combination of botanicals that makes each gin distinctive.
The dividing line between vodka and gin has always been the addition of juniper to gin. But among the spirits sold as gin today, some have reduced juniper to a secondary component while others seem to have dispensed with it altogether. We found that cardamom was prominent in quite a few of the 20 gins we had stirred into martinis.
“You see cardamom over and over,” Audrey said. “It’s exciting but you have to guard the category or you’ll just be drinking flavored vodkas.”
