Thank you, Doug, for your reply and sorry for not getting back to you earlier – a busy few days.
At this point we’re probably not going to focus on brands – we don’t want to turn this into a tasting-focused page or a buying guide. History is top of our mind, though, that’s for sure, and also a focus on production. Bitesize (internet! attention span!) but fulfilling enough (nerds and geeks!).
Just to see if it helps get the ball rolling and leads other users to offer their thoughts, let me give you a couple of examples which I think will help better understand what we’re looking to do.
- Blanc / Bianco vermouth: a lot of people think there are two types of blanc – the dry (Noilly ED, Dolin Dry) and the sweet (Dolin Blanc / Martini Bianco). Or they think that it’s very sweet and was invented by Gancia (see https://punchdrink.com/articles/bianco-vermouth-climbs-out-of-obscurity/). Or they think it’s ‘semi-sweet’. But Blanc / Bianco is not a color, it’s a style – you can’t have a dry blanc --, it’s almost never sweeter (in terms of sugar content) than reds and if it ever was semi-sweet, it’s not been the case for well over a century. Finally, it was of course invented in Chambéry, not in Italy. There’s a lot of confusion on blanc / bianco and it will fall under the purview of the new version of the website to clarify this.
- Colors in general: we’re really used to red vermouths but for 150 years, ‘rosso’ vermouth didn’t exist – all where golden, in more or less deep shades. Now, this is nice and important to mention at least in passing but I don’t think we need to dive deep into this so it’s not really something we’re looking to focus on.
Hope this clarifies a bit more what we’re looking to do – and if anyone has a comment / suggestion, please don’t hesitate. As it is, vermouth101 is already the best one-stop online resource for vermouth and we’re trying to build on this. We need your help…