Martinez

Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, and curaçao — Byron's 1884 cocktail that became the Martini through two substitutions: Old Tom → London Dry, sweet vermouth → dry.

The Martinez stands as the most important ancestral cocktail in the history of the Martini — a documented 1880s preparation whose gradual transformation through ingredient substitutions produced the most famous cocktail in the world. The earliest published Martinez recipe appears in O.H. Byron's The Modern Bartender's Guide (1884), specifying equal parts Old Tom gin and Italian sweet vermouth with a dash of curaçao and bitters — a formula that is closer to a sweet, complex Manhattan than to the dry, spirit-forward Martini it would eventually spawn. Jerry Thomas's revised 1887 Bar-Tenders Guide also included the recipe. The drink's name may reference the town of Martinez in Contra Costa County, California, where local tradition maintains that a Gold Rush-era bartender created the drink for a miner bound for San Francisco — a claim that cocktail historians including David Wondrich have found historically plausible but impossible to verify with documentary evidence. The transformation from Martinez to Martini involved two key substitutions: Old Tom gin, with its slight sweetness, gave way to London Dry gin as that style became commercially dominant; and Italian sweet vermouth gave way to French dry vermouth as American tastes shifted toward drier preparations through the early 20th century. The Martinez is now made intentionally to its 1880s specification by craft cocktail bars as a historical document of the Martini's sweeter, more complex origins.