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# The Ritual Is Bigger Than the Drink
- URL: https://the-second-home.ghost.io/the-ritual-is-bigger-than-the-drink/
- Published: 2026-09-05T21:03:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T21:03:58.000Z
- Author: Barbara Orzel

I never thought much about vermouth.

It wasn’t unknown to me. My dad drank it occasionally, so I had seen it around long before I moved to Spain. But in my head it belonged vaguely to the same category as Cinzano: familiar, slightly old-fashioned, and not particularly interesting to me.

Then, sometime last winter, Javi ordered vermouth with our pintxos.

I didn’t want beer. I wasn’t sure what else I wanted either, so I said I would have the same.

“You always have to copy what I order,” he said.

I didn’t. I simply had no better idea.

And that was more or less how it started.

There was no revelation. No sudden discovery of Mediterranean sophistication. I didn’t go home and start reading about vermouth. I simply liked it.

Then I ordered it again.

And again.

A few months later, while looking through photographs for this blog, I realised how often two small glasses of vermouth had somehow found their way into the frame.

Sometimes there was nothing else. Just two glasses on a table by the sea, an excuse to sit for a while and look at the Mediterranean.

Sometimes vermouth arrived before the food, while we were waiting for dinner. Sometimes it came with pintxos. At home, it might be served with olives, salted almonds, pistachios, jamón or whatever small, salty thing happened to be around.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_8095.jpeg)

Apparently, somewhere along the way, I had become a *vermutera*.

There is a Catalan expression that explains this much better than simply saying “to drink vermouth”: *fer el vermut*.

Literally, to “do” vermouth.

And what is being done is considerably bigger than what happens to be in the glass.

Vermouth itself is not Catalan. Aromatised wines have existed for centuries, while the modern history of vermouth is usually traced to late eighteenth-century Turin, where Antonio Benedetto Carpano began producing it commercially. Even the name comes from the German *Wermut*, meaning wormwood, one of the botanicals traditionally associated with the drink.

But vermouth travelled very well.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Reus, in southern Catalonia, had become one of Spain’s important centres of vermouth production. *Vermut de Reus* developed an identity of its own, and some of the producers associated with that tradition are still very much around today. Yzaguirre, whose white vermouth eventually became my favourite, is one of them.

The history is interesting. What interests me even more is what happened socially.

The name of a drink became the name of something people do.

To *fer el vermut* is not simply to consume vermouth. It belongs to the territory of the aperitif: meeting, sitting down, talking, eating something small.

Vermouth rarely arrives completely alone.

There are olives, salted almonds, pistachios, crisps, anchovies, conservas, jamón, perhaps a few pintxos. Sometimes that is the whole point. Sometimes it is only the beginning of a meal. Sometimes the distinction becomes pleasantly unclear.

And vermouth itself seems to fit all of these situations.

It can be a small stop in the middle of the day. It can be the opening of dinner. It can happen at a vermuteria, by the sea, at a bar, or at home.

That, I think, is why calling it simply a drink misses something.

Food and drink have always been ways of organising social time. “Going for coffee” is rarely an announcement that caffeine itself will be the central event. A glass of wine can mark the beginning of dinner. An aperitif creates a small interval between whatever came before and whatever is about to happen next.

Vermouth does this particularly well.

It asks for very little. A cold glass. Plenty of ice. Something salty nearby. My preference is now firmly for white vermouth with lemon. Red usually comes with orange. These are tiny details, but perhaps this is how rituals become visible: eventually, you develop opinions about things you once barely noticed.

And this is what amused me most when I went through my camera roll.

I had not been photographing vermouth.

I had been photographing afternoons, meals, views, tables, places we liked.

Vermouth just happened to be there.

Again and again, usually in pairs.

Perhaps that is the point.

Some rituals enter our lives ceremoniously. Others arrive because somebody orders a drink and you say, almost absent-mindedly, “I’ll have the same.”

A few months later, there is a bottle of your favourite white vermouth in the fridge.

And somehow, without deciding to, you have learnt to *fer el vermut*.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_8112-1-1.jpeg)