The Golden Age of Vermouth by Julius Motal
Bianca Miraglia is a vermouth master. She forages for most of her ingredients in nature, and flatly refuses to compromise her recipes with chemical additives. Her one-woman operation, Uncouth Vermouth, is a microcosm of flavor.
Transcript :
So I’m Bianca, I own Uncouth Vermouth. I’m a one-woman army in Red Hook Brooklyn.
We’re in a, people are saying it all the time, a golden age right now, where people are really taking liberties and expressing themselves creatively in liquid form, and this is one way that I’m doing it.
I’ve experimented at this point, I’ve made close to 300 different vermouths and a lot of them don’t work. You know, I tried to make a seaweed vermouth, but it was so disgusting. It was so fucking bad. I didn’t even want to cook with it.
So, the vermouth that I brought for you guys today, it’s one that has 17 plants in it, and I did a double infusion so I strained it after first infusion with 16 different plants. And then I reinfused it with cascade and nugget hops. So, kind of an unusual combination of worlds, so to speak.
You can ask me literally where any ingredient comes from. You can ask me what’s in everything that I’m doing, and I’ll tell you. You know, I have absolutely nothing to hide, and I’ve always been that way. I think that transparency is really key.
It’s been kind of a mission of mine. I stand on a soapbox as often as possible. The way that people have kind of understood that what I’m doing isn’t, you know, just kind of the poser crap, is because I’m the person at every single public tasting. Every industry tasting, it’s me.
Uncouth Vermouth unintentionally took over my life, and I ran with it.
more info:
Bianca Miraglia, 30, created a vermouth company called Uncouth Vermouth in 2012, after a long career in various wineries across the United States. Uncouth is known for its ever-changing lineup, thanks in no small part to the ingredients she forages around New York City.
Miraglia sought to inject new life into a beverage that almost always gathers dust in a kitchen cabinet or your local bar. With myriad herbs and spices at her disposal, she uses her space in Red Hook as a flavor laboratory where she mixes and matches different ingredients to create vermouths that don’t exist elsewhere.
Miraglia has encyclopedic knowledge about the vermouth industry, and she doesn’t mince words about what’s wrong with the most popular brands. They use chemicals to be consistent in flavor, whereas she goes for something new in every batch.
She began bartending at the age of 18 before transitioning to the wine industry, where she quickly learned that she did not want to be a winemaker. She turned to vermouth, and with her mother’s extensive knowledge of plants as inspiration, she started foraging and experimenting.
