i.The Territory
Marfa had good bars and no vermouth of its own. Every bottle on every back bar had crossed an ocean and then most of Texas to get there, and none of it tasted like the place it was being poured.
The idea was a dry white vermouth built entirely from what grows within a day’s drive: Texas High Plains vermentino for the base, and for the botanicals, the plants that make the Chihuahuan Desert smell the way it does.
ii.The Survey
Alex spent a year foraging along Highway 90 and up into the Davis Mountains, with written permission from four ranchers and one very suspicious goat. Fourteen separate macerations went into jars on a kitchen shelf: creosote, prairie sage, Mexican oregano, piñon, wild chamomile, prickly pear skins, and a few that are best not discussed.
Creosote is what you smell after rain in the desert. Picked dry, it tastes of tar. Picked the morning after a storm, it tastes of the storm.
The final blend uses nine of the fourteen. It was fortified with a grape brandy from Fredericksburg and bottled by hand, 600 bottles, in a borrowed cellar on Highland Avenue.
iii.The Coastline Redrawn
The first run sold out in five weeks, almost all of it within walking distance. The second run was 2,400 bottles.
Three bars in town now pour it as their house dry vermouth, and one of them serves it over a single ice cube with a strip of grapefruit and nothing else, which is exactly right. Creosote went from a smell people noticed after storms to an ingredient people ask for by name.