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How do we achieve all of this goals? By having the knowledge and expertise to support our style of service. These videos are designed as a resource and starting point for spirit proficiency. It is the expectation that new team members will complete and be able to discuss the content of these training videos.
Welcome welcome this is our fortified wine and aromatized wine 101 it is a 101 it is a primer there is a wealth of knowledge you can be gained on all of the different styles we’re going about to talk about today we are just going to give you just the smallest sip of each
One and I hope our descriptions of Port Sherry madira vermouth Americano all of these lead you to be interested in trying and learning about by trying all these different things Vino deporto port wine or just Port is a fortified wine from Portugal now similar wines are made all over the world
Whether it’s Argentina Australia the US Canada France South Africa but according to EU uh denomination of origin protection laws you can only call it port wine if it’s from Portugal port wine is made out of wines it’s a fortified wine that is made out of Base wines that are produced in the Doro
Valley now there are over a 100 varieties of grapes you can use in the production of Port but most of them come down to the five most popular the best or most common one being uh tooran National how is port wine made and why is it different from regular table wine also
Made in the same Valley well a couple of things are different but mainly what you normally think of is port wine the most common styles of port wine are sweet red wines like like that guy Port comes in a number of styles there’s Ruby there’s Tawny there’s vintage there’s white and
There’s a lot of sub substyles among all of those now Ruby is the most common and it is a sweet wine often served with dessert once again it’s not the only style but how is it made and why is it sweet well what happens is as as they’re
Making the wine they arrest fermentation by adding Spirit meaning if during fermentation alcoholic fermentation the yeast is eating the sugar and making alcohol but yeast can only tolerate alcohol to a certain point so how they make this wine sweet naturally is they let the wine partially vinify and then
They they dump in neutral grape Spirit or aente uh sometimes it’s called Brandy but it wouldn’t be a brandy like you’d expect to to see in the market it’s a neutral grape spirit is the way is the best way to think about it and they’ll
Take this spirit and put it in the vat and jack up the alcohol past where the yeast can survive what that does is a kills off the yeasts arrests any more further fermentation but leaves the sugar that the yeast didn’t eat as sugar so it is a naturally sweet red wine in
This Ruby style and they’ll let the wine uh vinify a little drier for drier Styles at the bar uh will reach for Ruby Tony and white ports for various cocktails vintage would be an expensive waste of money because as the name implies vintage port is very old and as something gets older
It’s more costly and it’s just not the best use of it in a cocktail but Ruby there are plenty of great examples of uh white port is really lovely in spritzes and refreshing drinks and Tony has interesting flavors that go really well with whiskies in the south of Spain wine has
Been made since the Phoenicians introduced The Grapes to the region in 1100 100 BCE so theyve been making wine in that area for a very very long time Columbus Christopher Columbus sailed with Sherry mellin spent more on Sherry for his trip than he did on weapons so
It’s been around a long time if for you Shakespeare fans fall staff when he’s drinking sack he means Sherry Sherry a fortified wine from the south of Spain notably the town of Heth DEA frona is where it gets its name so Sherry also called Heth or heades depending on what language you’re
Speaking it in they’re all featured prominently on the back of the bottle so Sherry is made in a number of styles most commonly Sherry is made from a grape called Palamino now the lighter kind of table white wine styles of pheno or manania there are richer darker
Styles that often are allowed to oxidize so they are all fortified the same way say Port is fortified but the richer darker styles are also allowed to oxidize meaning that the wine is allowed to touch or contact air in large quantity so the Richer Styles am monato
And uh oroso are also allowed to oxidize there are some dessert Styles made from some different grapes mostly moscatel and Pedro henz and sometimes those grapes are backed into the Richer darker Styles just to give them some more body now these share these styles are really nice to use in cocktails the lighter
Lighter stuff really works well when you’re thinking you want to plug and play something that would come with a vermouth the Richer Styles also can be really nice for heavier sweeter vermouths Andor uh they’re often used to substitute for Spirit In Low ABV cocktail variations madira it gets its
Name from The Island from which it comes which is madira it’s a Portuguese Island just off the coast of Africa now on the island they grow four major grapes for the making of their wines there’s um malvasia Bal uh verdelho which is just how the Portuguese say verdejo and
Cal this is rainwater which is made in a number of different kinds of grapes depending on which one and it’s a lighter style so there’s heavier richer Styles and they’re lighter styles that what they all share in common is uh a rich raisined flavor profile now what separates besides the geography uh these
Wines from say port and Sherry is that Port is fortified and Sherry in the Richer Styles is allowed to oxidize this is fortified it is allowed to oxidize but it is also mized which is a word that takes its name from madira but it really just means they cook it they
Basically raise it in temperature to I believe around 145 degrees and keep it there from months on end to mimic the conditions and the holes of ships that they had when they were exporting it and we were importing it in the new world and what happened to the wine is that
Kind of almost toasty caramell notes that were allowed to develop were something that were sought after from therefore but also made the wine kind of bulletproof once you oxidize and Mize a wine it’s really kind of hard to mess it up after that so we really like this
Wine to use in cocktails because those raisined notes and those those hints of toffee caramel kind of kind of notes really uh favor a lot of fruit flavors and also go really really well with a a large variety of spirits aromatized fortified wine it’s a big category we have a few
Examples here the most famous examples of aromatized fortified wine are vermouth now aromatized fortified wine is as the name suggest wine that has been fortified and and then aromatized simply meaning that Botanicals and flavorings were added to either this the base spirit that we’re fortifying with
Or the wine itself in order to give flavor and a lot of these Botanicals come from the like phological background of of spirits basically so Anthony badet carpano was the first person to name his product verou a after the um the German word vermut so he had he came up with
The style that became known as um vermut turino because it was from the duche of of Torin so he had what we came to be called sweet red Italian style of verou once that became incredibly popular throughout Europe people started doing their own riffs on it Joseph Nali in the south of
France came up with dry vermouth so all also a wine fortified and then ALS and and imbued with different Botanicals that were more present in the area of the Mediterranean France so it’s a dry wine instead of a sweet wine it presents white instead of red and then finally
The Big Three vermouths we have Blanc vermouth which was uh invented in shury which is now in France and it was a it’s a clear white vermouth but it is sweeter then sweet red Italian vermouth so our three main styles of vermouth would be sweet red
Italian I should also let you know at this point that the red is not from the grapes these are white grapes but there are caramel meaning burnt sugar added for coloring and it’s part of the classification of this style of vermouth especially in Torin if you want to make
Verua Torino doesn’t matter what producer you are there’s a number of different ones leg legally you have to use burnt sugar to color your wine that’s part of of of the style of of making wine in in this area so you have sweet red Italian vermouth you have dry
French vermouth and then you have Blanc vermouth that being said all of the styles of Routh are made in all of the places that make them right in France they make sweet they make red sweet vermouth they make Blanc vermouth and in Italy they make dry vermouth but the nicknames have held in
Some circles that the red the red kind you just call Italian so if you’re looking at an old cocktail book and it says Italian vermouth they mean this style if it says French vermouth they mean this style regardless of where you get it from so those are the three
Vermouths now vermouth gets its name from the German word vermouth which is the word for wormwood wormwood being a bitter herb or it’s the herb used to Bitter this so when I was talking about coming from a history of pharmacology bitter herbs were often used to open the appetite and to help
Digestion all over Europe for history it’s the same reason that bitter herbs are used in the making of Jin bitter bitter herbs are used in the making of a lot of things but they’re used in this case for digestion but wormwood’s not the only one so the category of aromatized
Fortified wine became popular and it often became the vermouth specifically became popular all across Europe and then all across the world this is a Spanish vermouth these are American vermouths Japanese vermouths so all over the world we’re making vermouths now but also that same idea of using a bitter
Bottom end note in fortified wine for digestion and as an apptivo became popular in many different styles Americano is a very popular style and that came when they started mixing um ativo like Kari that style of of Lor with sweet red Italian vermouth and you got they would bottle them together and
Call it an Americano or in the American style after the fact that Americans like to mix things so there’s the a traditional kind of Americano apertif this is uh an Americano Bianco or or a white uh Americano this is bonal jenin Kina now that means it’s it’s bittered with both
Jenin another bitter herb and when it says Kina on the bottle that means quinine the same thing that makes tonic bitter that same uh the the same salt from the bark of the sinona tree is used in here uh this is also a Gran kin Kina
Notice that name Kina comes up again and that means quinine so whether you’re bittering with bitter herbs like vermouth or gensin or you’re bittering with quinine almost all of these things purport to have these benefits of opening the appetite before before the meal or helping you to just after the
Meal and although these just like the ports and cherries and maderas that we showed earlier were all intended originally to be consumed by themselves uh here we make them in cocktail we use them as ingredients in Cocktails so there’s clearly an entire alphabet a history of remou based cocktails but
Also these are becoming more and more popular and have been popular and as the category of remou and the styles of remou stratify out and give us more and more options we’ll continue to find new and new ways to use delicious ingredients like these in the rest of our cocktails great