From the Martinez to the Vesper: The Mythology of Martinis

Like many of the most famous cocktails, the Martini is at its foundation and most widely accepted recipe, exceptionally simple: gin and vermouth, with an olive or twist of lemon peel for garnish. Nothing more. Stirred, actually, not shaken. And yet, as simple as that recipe is, few cocktails have as many variations and corruptions as the Martini. Chocotinis, appletinis…bacontinis. Even restricting oneself to the most basic and stringent definition of a Martini — gin and vermouth — brokers no respite from debate, as imbibers will argue endlessly about the amount of vermouth (three-quarters of an ounce? half an ounce? a wash? have the bartender inhale vermouth vapor and whisper the word “vermouth” into the glass?) and the type (dry or sweet). There isn’t even total agreement on the type of gin to use. London dry is most common — because for decades, that’s all we had. But earlier recipes called for Old Tom gin, and the craft cocktail movement of the 2000s has made once rare spirits like Old Tom style gin available again. And yes, for many, James Bond’s beloved vodka Martini and the Vesper are as much a perversion of the Martini as the peanut butter Martini or the whipped cream Martini.

The Martini has been around since the mid-to-late 1800s. Its life has spanned the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Summer of Love, disco, punk rock, and Hammer Pants. It has been in style, out of fashion, and subject to the particularly peculiar and not always trustworthy whims of the American drinker. Its ingredients have been altered over the decades to compensate here for a shortage of one ingredient, there for a shortage of another. With so much time and so much change under its belt, the idea of pedantry in regards to the Martini seems a little misplaced, but then most pedantry does. When the origins and recipe of a drink are as convoluted as those of a Martini, you are well served by being adventurous. Adventurous, mind you. Not foolhardy. Even at his most reckless, James Bond would not have ordered a pink bubblegum martini (Pink Gin on the other hand…).

The Martini enjoyed continued popularity throughout the thirties, even when the Hayes Code more or less banished cocktails and hard liquor from American movie screens (even Nick Charles switched to apple cider or milk in the later films). It was such a simple drink. Clean, clear, elegant. A worthy icon for drinking culture. Before too long, the shape of a Martini glass (which was designed to look the way it does either because the shape helps bring out the bouquet of the gin while keeping the ingredients from separating, or because the wide opening made it easy during Prohibition to dump the drink quickly if the police came a-raiding) became the international symbol for “alcohol served here,” and neon lights shaped like the glasses became common sights outside cocktail bars.

When you tally everything up at the end of the day, there are other drinks Bond consumes with greater frequency, but none of them have attained the recognizable status of the Martini. 007’s signature drink has become as iconic as the man himself, and the two are intrinsically linked. Just about every novice drinker makes the social faux pas of ordering their first Martini by saying, “a vodka Martini, shaken not stirred,” while thinking they’re maybe the first (or, at worst, the third) person to order a Martini that way. Across the world, anyone who can understand what you are saying probably gets the reference. More committed Bond aficionados will hit the bartender with the full set of instructions from Casino Royale, and more than a few bartenders will know what you mean when you simply ask for a Vesper.

Amazingly, until 2006 no screen Bond had ever consumed a Vesper since, other than the farcical 1967 send-up of Casino Royale, there had never been a screen Vesper Lynd to inspire its creation. At the time Fleming wrote Casino Royale, there was no big bidding war for the rights to make it into a film. In fact, the first people to give Fleming a go were American television producers, who purchased the rights to Casino Royale and filmed it in 1954 as a live television drama for the series Climax! In that early adaptation, British agent James Bond became American agent Jimmy Bond, played by American actor Barry Nelson. But don’t worry, England. American agent Felix Leiter became British secret agent Clarence Leiter (I get Felix wasn’t British enough), played by Michael Pate. Poor Vesper Lynd got combined with French intelligence officer Rene Mathis and became Valerie Mathis (played by Linda Christian). It’s not the most exciting hour of television, but the casting of Peter Lorre as Bond’s gambling table nemesis Le Chiffre was inspired. In this version, Bond orders only one drink: a scotch and water, which he never actually consumes. He and Le Chiffre both seem far more excited by cold, straight water. “Le Chiffre…can I have some water?” Bond inquires, to which Le Chiffre responds, “Oh yes, with pleasure. Basil, give him all the water he wants. Get me some water, too.”

The film rights to Casino Royale were sold again in 1955 for $6,000 to an actor-director named Gregory Ratoff. However, he never got around to making the movie. After Ratoff’s death in 1960 the rights ended up with American producer Charles K. Feldman. Feldman too was slow to move on the film. By the time he was ready to go into production, the Bond books were hits and Eon Productions, being a partnership between British producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and American producer Harry Saltzman, had sewn up the rights to all other current and future James Bond novels. Feldman tried to sell Casino Royale to Eon, but they weren’t interested. Compared to novels like Dr. No and From Russia with Love, the first book is rather slow and a bit overly emotional. Feldman decided that rather than try to produce a competing James Bond film, he would simply make Casino Royale a farce. And despite the end product of that (some say misguided) effort containing no fewer than seven James Bonds (the absurdly convoluted plot involves MI6 trying to confuse SMERSH by fielding a bunch of fake James Bonds) and at least one Vesper Lynd, not a single character drinks a Vesper. And so it would remain until the 21st century.

Back to Basics. Back to Fleming

By the closing credits of Die Another Day — possibly some time before that, actually (maybe the CGI wind-surfing on a tsunami) — Bond enthusiasts and casual filmgoers alike were exhausted by the increasingly outlandish degree of bloat that had crept back into the series. In 2002, both the films and the books, with Raymond Benson’s The Man with the Red Tattoo, took a little time off, visited Shrublands to sweat off some of that excess, and re-evaluated what it was to be James Bond in a post 9/11 — and perhaps more influential in terms of pop culture — a post Bourne Identity world.

Things had changed dramatically in the drinking world as well. Despite the appearance of Jack Daniels in Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as 007, the Bond films of the 1990s had been more or less in line with those of the Moore era when it came to Bond’s drinks and overall lifestyle, relying on a lazy but effective cultural short-hand for elegance — tuxedos, martinis, and champagne — that made Bond’s drinking habits every bit as boring as the BMW 750iL he drives in Tomorrow Never Dies. This indifference to the more esoteric corners of drinking culture area reflection of the greater cultural indifference toward cocktails, whiskey, and strange foreign concoctions in the United States (by then firmly in the driver’s seat of the Bond film franchise). And that culture, in turn, was reflected in the choices of the writers and directors of the Bond films. Lee Tamahori (the screenwriter for Die Another Day), for example, was born in 1950. He would have been coming of age as part of the generation that was rejecting anything associated with the previous — including cocktails and whiskey. It’s no wonder that the larger cultural lack of interest was reflected in the screenplays of the Bond films. It would have been the same as writing scenes in which Bond ponders the intricacies of sock garters or men’s night shirts. The writers did not have the background to bring such things to the screen, not in the same capacity as boozy World War II veterans and real-life spies like Ian Fleming and Terence Young.

But then, around the same time Die Another Day was crashing onto screens, something changed. There was a resurgence in interest in cocktails from the dusty old archives of drinking history. The internet suddenly made sharing information and enthusiasm much easier, and the occasional bartender here or there interested in the drinking culture of the 1950s, the 1920s, and earlier and tired of making yet another vodka and soda suddenly found him or herself able to communicate with other like-minded bartenders and historians. From colonial punches to Prohibition classics to sleek mid-century dazzlers, people suddenly started remembering this really great thing we used to do — and do well. The craft cocktail boom was born, and bartenders started strapping on the braces and waistcoats and turning to the forgotten flavors and recipes of Jerry Thomas and Ada Coleman.

Beneath the Sex and the City surface of appletinis, adventurous drinkers were following the lead of equally adventurous bars and rediscovering complicated old cocktails and challenging old liquors. By the time Casino Royale was released in 2006, James Bond could once again walk into a bar and order a Negroni, confident that he would receive something other than a puzzled look. Heck, chances are he could have walked into a bar and asked for a Vesper, and the bartender would be reaching for the Gordon’s and Kina Lillet before 007 had even had time to rattle off his list of ingredients and instructions.

In 1999, Eon’s long struggle to obtain the rights to Casino Royale was finally settled. Eon and Warner Brothers obtained ownership of the film rights to the book after trading the character of Spider-Man to Sony in exchange. This meant that, after nearly half a century of wandering the desert, the very first James Bond novel could finally come home and become part of the official James Bond movie franchise — as could the first Bond girl and the drink named in her honor. The new Casino Royale would strip away the CGI excess and science fiction absurdism of Die Another Day and return the series to a much more grounded experience; no different, really, than what happened during Moore’s tenure as James Bond, when the outlandish science fiction of Moonraker gave way to the more subdued style of For Your Eyes Only. For that matter, it was really no different than what happened with Connery as well, when the sprawl of You Only Live Twice led to the more controlled On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In every case, the mantra was the same when things got too out of control: let’s get back to the source. Let’s get back to Ian Fleming.

Rather than positioning itself as a direct sequel existing in what laughably passes for continuity in the Bond universe, 2006’s Casino Royale simply went about the business of telling its story, uninterested in whether it was a sequel or a reboot or an alternate reality or the fulfillment of the theory of some fans that James Bond is actually a Time Lord from the Doctor Who series and must regenerate into a new appearance from time to time. Whatever the case, 007 finally got to order a Vesper on-screen. The official recipe, to quote James Bond in Fleming’s original novel (which Daniel Craig sticks to):

A dry Martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
“Certainly, monsieur.” The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
“Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,” said Leiter.

Saying Our Vespers

While fans of the Bond books were happy to see the Vesper, regardless of whether or not Martini purists consider it controversial, assume its rightful place in the canon of Bond films, there were still a couple problems, all of which arise from the fact that over fifty years had passed since Fleming first committed the recipe to page. In that time, the proof of Gordon’s gin had dropped. And Kina Lillet hadn’t been available for decades. Even in the time Fleming was writing Casino Royale, the company had dropped the Kina (which referred to quinine which was added to the spirit) and was simply known as Lillet. Although Lillet still exists, the recipe was changed in 2006, removing the quinine in recipe as well as name. Which means if you order a Vesper with the exact specifications issued by Bond, you will get a very different cocktail than he got. The ship can be righted by replacing Gordon’s with Gordon’s Export (which retains the higher proof) or another common London Dry gin, such as Tanqueray. As for the Lillet, you can try using modern Lillet Blanc with a dash or two of Angostura Bitters.

However, not getting the same drink as James Bond might be a good idea. Kingsley Amis, the man first hired to continue the James Bond book series after the death of Ian Fleming, also wrote a nonfiction literary study of Bond before himself becoming a Bond author. In his 1965 The James Bond Dossier, Amis claims that Fleming simply got his Lillets confused. Kina Lillet would have been far too bitter an ingredient, and given that the Vesper is a variation of the Martini, Fleming probably meant Lillet vermouth.

And while we assume the reason Bond never orders a Vesper again is because of the betrayal he suffers at her hands, perhaps the reality is more mundane: maybe he took that first sip and realized he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. Fleming himself lends credence to the assertion that the Vesper was concocted under mistaken assumptions. In the same letter to the Manchester Guardian in which he discussed why, thankfully James Bond was named James Bond and not Peregrine Maltravers, Fleming issued a mea culpa regarding the Vesper: “I proceeded to invent a cocktail for Bond, which I sampled several months later and found unpalatable.”

Although it is often referred to as a Martini, cocktail purists will see little in the Vesper to qualify it as such. Debate has raged for years among the types of people prone to debating things like how to make a proper drink. Vodka? But Martinis are made with gin! A champagne goblet? But there is a piece of glasswear called a Martini glass! SHAKEN??? But that destroys the drink! Certainly 007 makes some curious choices when it comes to his signature drink, but then James Bond rarely plays by the rules. And for such a simple drink there is a tremendous amount of debate surrounding the Martini, including where it was invented, what you should put in it, and how the ingredients are mixed. Insisting on this way or that way being the proper way, or the only real way, to make a Martini can take on the pseudo-religious fervor of a Connery versus Moore debate. How did we come to such a contentious state? How can such a simple drink cause so much controversy? Will knowing the history of the Martini help us understand why it inspires so much impassioned debate? No, it won’t, because the cocktail’s history is every bit as contentious as how much vermouth one should use, and as unclear and murky as an overly dirty Martini.

California Cocktail Courts

Many of the world’s best-known cocktails have a clearly defined pedigree, including when, where, and by whom they were created. That’s not the case with the Martini. The first published record of the drink was in bartender Jerry Thomas’ guide, The Bar-Tender’s Guide (also known as How to Mix Drinks or: The Bon-Vivant’s Companion), first published in 1862 but revised and reprinted in 1887. But that’s not saying much, since The Bar-Tender’s Guide was the first published collection of cocktail recipes rather than a compendium of drinks Thomas himself created. But its appearance in the book often causes the creation of the Martini to be attributed to Thomas, and to the bar at which he was employed at the time, the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. Indeed the city of San Francisco is quite adamant that it was the birthplace of the cocktail that has come to embody the entirety of cocktail culture. Others, however, are not so acquiescent to San Francisco’s claim.

Across the Bay, about forty miles northeast of San Francisco, is the small town of Martinez, which also lays claim to being the birthplace of the Martini. As they tell it, a miner who had just struck gold entered a local watering hole and asked the bartender to make him a drink so that he might celebrate his bonnie luck. The bartender basically threw together what he had at hand — fortified wine (vermouth) and gin. The drink was a hit with the newly wealthy miner, who referred to it by the name of the town — Martinez — at least until such time that he was so drunk he slurred the name into something vaguely resembling “Martini.” The town of Martinez even uses San Francisco’s own claim against in. Jerry Thomas’ bar guide refers to the drink as a “Martinez.” Even he knew it came from the town of Martinez, right?

Ah, but not so fast! As San Francisco tells the legend, the miner walked into the Occidental and ordered the drink, and when asked by Jerry where he was headed next, the miner said he was going to return to Martinez. So Jerry named the drink in honor of the man’s next stop. And to San Francisco’s credit, they at least have a name and a place associated with the event. There is no name associated with either the bar or the bartender who allegedly invented the drink in Martinez (though current Martinez mayor Rob Schroder said in a 2013 interview with Esquire that the bar was owned by a man named Julio Richelieu, the name of a Bond villain if ever I heard one). But Martinez sticks to its guns, claiming the Martini as a native son and insisting that the only way Jerry Thomas got the recipe was when this mysterious miner, having already had the drink in Martinez, traveled to San Francisco, went to the Occidental, and instructed Thomas on how to make what had become his favorite libation back home.

Old Tom is not a brand of gin, but a style, a little sweeter than London Dry, which today is the much better known and far more popular style of gin (chances are, if you are not a cocktail nerd or a serious gin drinker, any gin you can name will be a London Dry). Jerry’s recipe calls for Old Tom gin. Pink Gin was originally made with Plymouth gin. And modern Martinis use London Dry. Each of these is a different style of gin, a variation on the central theme of a spirit distilled from grain and flavored with herbs and aromatic botanicals — not unlike Italian amaro, actually, with the exception of using grain alcohol as the base instead of wine, and the favoring of sweeter botanicals compared to the Italian taste for bitterness.

As legend has it (you’ll notice that a lot of what passes for fact in booze history begins with the qualifier “legend has it”), Old Tom gin got its name from the “old tom”-cat shaped signs that hung above many public houses in 18th-century England. The stories get more elaborate when they start to claim that, because gin was against the law at the time (something to do with some drunken murderous nastiness), enterprising pub owners would distill their own gin, which would then be pumped through a house and out of the cat, where waiting gin fans could sneak a nip since nothing is less conspicuous than sucking a shot of gin out of a wooden cat’s butt. Old Tom gin fell out of style and, much like American rye, almost disappeared entirely from the world until the craft cocktail and craft distilling renaissance of the 21st century sent young distillers digging through old records and recipes so they might recreate a lost spirit. While Old Tom style gin is still a niche product compared to London Dry, brands like Ransom and Hayman’s have done remarkable work bringing this forgotten spirit back from the dead, though without the need to suck it out of a cat’s butt.

The feud between the two cities over the claim became so absurd that the city of San Francisco convened a special hearing to settle the question once and for all. The Court of Historical Review eventually determined that the Martini was indeed invented in San Francisco. Which might have settled thing but for the small detail that the Court of Historical Review was in San Francisco. Citing a conflict of interest, and claiming the judge had sampled too much evidence, Martinez appealed the decision. The appeal, which took place in a court in Martinez, “shockingly” overturned the San Francisco decision and determined that the Martini was indeed invented in Martinez. San Francisco wasn’t the only party to roll their eyes at the “court decision.” Over in Italy, of all places, the company Martini & Rossi was claiming that they, or at least some Italian bartender, had invented the drink, and that the name “Martini” derived from the trend of asking for a cocktail by the name of the primary ingredient. Thus, a cocktail based on Martini Vermouth would simply be ordered by asking for “a Martini.” Hell, it’s as good a claim as any.

It is unlikely, despite kangaroo cocktail courts (incidentally, the original name for a vodka Martini was the “kangaroo cocktail”) and marketing materials, that the origin of the Martini will ever be properly determined. Jerry Thomas passed away in 1885, blissfully unaware that the future would hold so much cocktail controversy. The Occidental was destroyed in an earthquake in 1905. With so much about the Martini’s genesis existing purely in the realm of hearsay and “legend has it,” modern drinkers are better off hearing the stories, filing them away, and simply enjoying the drink. Ah, if only it was that simple.

From Martinez to Martini

So how did the Martini of Jerry Thomas’ time become the clear, minimalist gin and vermouth concoction that became synonymous with James Bond, Don Draper, and mid-century cocktail culture as a whole? A number of factors contributed to the Martinez becoming the Martini. Part of it was simply changing tastes. Old Tom gin fell out of fashion, replaced by the London Dry style that most people recognize as gin today — your Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray, Beefeater, or Gordon’s. Similarly, affinity for sweet vermouth was replaced around 1900 with a preference for dry vermouth. It’s around this time that New York City somewhat belatedly gets in on the “who created the Martini” debate. Time for a little more “legend has it.”

This particular legend comes to us courtesy of the New Yorker magazine, in an article that contains little in the way of supporting evidence but is no more or less plausible than the claims of San Francisco, Martinez, or Italy. In 1911, the head bartender at the popular Knickerbocker Hotel in New York was a gentleman named Martini di Arma di Taggia. With London Dry style gin becoming more and more popular, it was purportedly Martini who mixed the first dry Martini and lent his first name to the cocktail. It’s also been claimed that the drink was either invented for or soon became the favorite of captain of industry John D. Rockefeller. This claim, at least, can be branded as exceptionally dubious, given that Rockefeller was a well-known teetotaler. Whatever the case, the Knickerbocker story gets us one step closer to the modern Martini.

Gin increased dramatically in popularity (the Martinez, if you look at the recipe, was primarily a vermouth cocktail) during Prohibition. Unlike a good whiskey, gin didn’t need to be aged, so it could be produced very quickly, in large quantities, for fairly cheaply. And as gin’s stock rose, so did the Martini transform into a gin cocktail. When Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, the gin Martini more or less as we know it today emerged as the preeminent star of the cocktail world, especially now that bathtub gin could be replaced with quality, professionally made gin. Despite what many people think these days, a “dry” Martini did not always mean “a Martini with as little vermouth as possible”. It simply meant a Martini made with dry vermouth, rather than sweet. Exactly when and where the olive came into the mix is…well, you can probably guess by now that nobody knows for sure, but there are some legends.

A Vodka Martini. Shaken, Not Stirred

Even for those who couldn’t care less about Martinez, gold mining, Jerry Thomas, or those crazy Italians, ordering a Martini can still be a minefield. Granted, you can walk into pretty much any cocktail bar and just order a damn Martini, and the bartender will nod (etiquette suggestion: do not walk up to a bartender and literally order “a damn Martini”) and make you a drink. But the drink that bartender makes for you — well, it could contain any number of ingredients in any number of combinations, and that’s even if we disregard all the flavor-tinis that clogged up the works. Gin and vermouth, right? Some people are even iffy on the olive (I am; I hate olives). And what kind of vermouth? How much? Ah, you want vodka, not gin? Oh, you’re James Bond and you want vodka and gin? Oh, you want a Martini, but you want it made with tequila? Come on! The line has to be drawn somewhere.

But why shaken? Is it possible that James Bond drinks a shaken Martini because Ian Fleming heard it from an authority as respectable as Dashiell Hammett’s (or rather, William Powell’s) Nick Charles? Well, maybe. But Fleming (who, as befits all great storytellers, is not always the most reliable source when it comes to his own life), has his own story about how he, and thus James Bond, came to prefer his Martinis shaken. As the story goes (different than “legend has it”), while Fleming was in Berlin after the end of World War II (after his tenure with Naval Intelligence, Fleming took a job with Kemsley Newspapers, which allowed him to continue to indulge his taste for travel and adventure) when he encountered a bartender by the name of Hans Schroder. Schroder shook the martinis he made, and Fleming adored them.

By the end of the Fleming era, Bond had still shown no preference for vodka or gin martinis, and except on occasion, he doesn’t seem to mind whether they are shaken or stirred. In total, Bond orders nineteen vodka martinis and sixteen gin martinis throughout Fleming’s novels. The first utterance of the phrase, “A martini. Shaken, not stirred” comes in 1956’s Diamonds Are Forever, but it is only the third person narrator who says it. Bond doesn’t speak the line until 1958’s Dr. No, when he requests of his diabolical captor a martini, “shaken and not stirred.” It wasn’t until the movies took over as the face of James Bond that the preference was entered into the public consciousness, to be forever repeated by corny barflies doing their worst slightly slurred Sean Connery impersonation. But even Connery doesn’t utter that immortal line until the third of the films, Goldfinger (the phrase makes an appearance in Dr. No, the first of the Bond films, but it is Dr. No rather than Bond who says it). But then, Goldfinger was the point at which the Bond films truly came into their own as a pop culture phenomenon. Everything people think of as being “a Bond movie” comes from or was perfected in Goldfinger, so it’s no surprise that the signature drink of James Bond would come from that film as well, regardless of what he’d been drinking in the two previous films.

Russian Revolution

As to why the cinematic James Bond preferred vodka instead of the more traditional gin, aside from him simply being an iconoclast, there are conspiracy theories. Chief among them is that Smirnoff was a sponsor of the films and leaned on producers to make sure their product was featured prominently. And indeed it is pretty front and center in Dr. No. There two famous stills from that film. The first is Ursula Andress on the beach in her white bikini. No vodka needed for that scene. The second is of Bond pouring himself a drink from what the camera makes sure you know is a Smirnoff bottle. Smirnoff remained a high profile partner of the films, but the notion that the vodka martini came to be because of some behind the scenes deal doesn’t hold water (or vodka, for that matter). For starters, the vodka martini makes appearances in the books, predating the movies. Also, vodka companies like Smirnoff were already making huge advertising pushes in the United States, and selling mid-century America vodka as a cooler ingredient that gin in a Martini was part of the package. Of course, I’m sure the money didn’t hurt, but it’s likely Bond would have ended up drinking a vodka Martini sooner or later regardless of whether or not Smirnoff put the bug in the producers’ ears.

In the books, Bond drinks vodka Martinis. He also drinks gin Martinis. He seems relatively neutral in the matter, switching from one to the other with little concern. When Fleming started publishing Bond novels, vodka was persona non grata in the West. The Cold War had its first flare-up in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War. The same year it ended, Casino Royale was published. England and the Soviet Union may have been uncomfortable allies during World War II, but the subsequent decade put a chill on the working relationship. Europe was quickly carved up into spheres of influence. The remaining bulk of the 1950s was occupied by things like the Cuban Revolution, culminating in the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by the United States, the first major disaster of young President John Kennedy (himself a huge fan of Ian Fleming’s books). That same year, the Berlin Wall went up. In 1962, the world sat on edge during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bit of nuclear brinkmanship played by the Soviets and Americans. The first James Bond movie, Dr. No, was also released that year.

Point being, things between England, the US, and the Soviet Union were not exactly cozy. It was a very odd combination to have a blockbuster movie series about a suave British secret agent who swilled endless amounts of Russian vodka while matching wits against those self-same Russians (at least in the books, where Bond spends a lot of time fighting agents from Spetsyalnye Metody Razoblacheniya Shpyonov, also known as Smert Shpionam, or simply SMERSH; the Sean Connery era movies performed a bit of detente and attributed most everything to the a-national Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion — SPECTRE). Most of the Western world, like Bond’s boss M, considered vodka dreadful communist swill, certainly nowhere near as respectable and sophisticated as good ol’ Scottish whisky or English gin or American bourbon. Or even wine. And yet, the moment that iconic shot of Sean Connery as James Bond pouring from a bottle of Smirnoff vodka hit movie screens, the once запрещенный spirit known as vodka was suddenly in vogue, Cold War be damned. Even more audacious, it quickly became an alternative to good ol’ English gin in perhaps the most iconic of all cocktails, the Martini.

In the Bond novels, the Martini proper makes its first appearance in the second of the books, Live and Let Die. In the opening of the book, while Bond is relaxing in his room at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, he is visited by his friend Felix Leiter, who mixes up a couple Martinis; regular old gin Martinis. Later, when the two agents are at the hotel’s King Cole Bar, Leiter again orders Martinis for he and Bond, and once again they are gin Martinis (House of Lords brand gin, to be precise, with Martini & Rossi vermouth). Unlike the Knickerbocker, the St. Regis is still in existence, on 5th Avenue at 55th Street. Designed in the beaux arts style that was prevalent at the time, and standing eighteen stories tall, The St. Regis was the tallest hotel in New York when it was completed in 1904. Its owner was a member of New York’s premiere old money family, John Jacob Astor IV, who perished aboard the Titanic in 1912.

The hotel passed to his son, Vincent, who soon sold it to a man by the name of Benjamin Duke. In 1932 Duke expanded the hotel, adding the King Cole Bar (anticipating the end of Prohibition). The bar took its name from a mural of King Cole that hung behind the counter. The mural was not a St. Regis original. It had previously hung in another bar. That bar, as fate had it, was the one in the Knickerbocker Hotel. And although the hotel, now the St. Regis-Sheraton, changed ownership multiple times and endured many renovations and restorations, the King Cole Bar is still there, waiting for savvy secret agents to slip in and have a Martini — although the King Cole is better known for the drink that was invented there: the Red Snapper,.

If the Red Snapper sounds familiar, its because it came from the same man who invented the Bloody Mary. Fernand Petiot was a Parisian bartender plying his trade at the famous Harry’s New York Bar, where he created the Bloody Mary. During the Second World War, Petiot moved to New York, where he settled into a position at the King Cole and fully expected to put his famous Bloody Mary on the menu. The hotel’s owners did not care for the name, however. Too graphic for Americans, they thought, and simply too déclassé for the King Cole’s upscale patrons. What would that have made of a Sex on the Beach? Or for that matter, what would they have made of the juvenile sexual connotations that would later become associated with the cocktail’s new name, the Red Snapper? or the bawdy secret contained in the iconic painting of King Cole from which the bar derived its entire identity?

It is not until the end of Live and Let Die, when Bond is luxuriating with his female conquest of the novel, Solitaire, that the iconically Bondian shaken vodka Martini drink makes its first appearance. “I hope I’ve made it right,” Solitaire remarks as she hands Bond the drink. “Six to one sounds terribly strong. I’ve never had vodka Martinis before.” But Fleming presumably had. He spent a considerable amount of time in Moscow, first as a reporter for the Reuters News Agency in 1933, covering the trial of six British engineers accused of espionage. The trial was a fairly transparent sham using confessions from tortured prisoners (who would later recant on their confessions, then go back to sticking by them after some additional time in the hands of Soviet secret police). In the end two of the engineers received light sentences; one was acquitted entirely; and two were expelled from the Soviet Union. The leniency in punishments in what was supposed to be an open-and-shut espionage trial for the USSR was attributed by many to the coverage of Fleming, whose diligent accounts of the trial caused international uproar at the bald-faced corruption of the Soviet justice system.

Years later, Fleming found himself in Moscow again, although this time it was only his cover that had him as a reporter. This return, in 1939, was actually at the behest of Great Britain’s Foreign Office, which wanted to take advantage of Fleming’s easy social demeanor and proficiency in multiple languages. It was while serving in this capacity that he first came to the attention of Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the man who would eventually recruit him into Naval Intelligence. It’s also when Fleming had his first immersion in the national spirit of the Soviet Union and Russia before it: vodka. It’s likely, given the prevalence of vodka in the Soviet Union, that Fleming had his fair share of martinis that substituted vodka for gin. The two spirits are about as similar as they are dissimilar (both are clear and distilled, but vodka does not have any of the juniper and botanical flavor of gin), but as pre-war vodka would have been the burlier of the two spirits, it’s far better suited for being shaken in a cocktail.

Once Bond put the final seal of approval on the vodka martini, it became the martini. The tables turned, and where once you had to specify a vodka martini if that was your druthers, you now had to specifically request a gin martini if that was what you had in mind. Ironically, however, as vodka’s stock continued to rise, the Martini did not come along for the ride. By the end of the 1960s, drinks like the Martini were regarded as old fashioned and boringly upper middle class by the emerging youth counter-culture. And though the 1970s saw a return of cocktail culture, it was an extremely different scene than it had been before the Summer of Love. Vodka was the superstar of the next two decades, but as a largely flavorless ingredient in sweet, fruit juice cocktails like the Harvey Wallbanger or the juvenile Sex on the Beach. And say what you will about both the Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton tenures as Bond during these dark decades of cloying concoctions; at least both of them had the good sense to never, ever walk up to the bartender and ask for a Harvey Wallbanger…shaken, not stirred.