Maeve Higgins: I’m officially a grown-up — I've swapped rosé for martinis

No more sparkling sweet stuff. It has to be flat, ice cold, and sour

Maeve Higgins has swapped her rosé days for martini evenings.

I’m a grown-up now, and I have left childish things behind. Gone are the days of a cute glass of rosé on the steps of my house, waving and smiling at the neighbours as I sip — no more sparkling, sweet, floral drinks. Give me a drink that is flat, ice-cold, and sour — like my heart. 

I’ve started to drink martinis. Let me be accurate here, not martinis, plural, just the one does just fine at the end of each day. And when I drink one martini, it indeed does become the end of the day. A glass of wine allows me to muddle along, cooking and chatting. A martini does not.

So when you’ve had quite enough experiences for one unit of 24 hours, try a martini. There is a finality to this cocktail that is entirely seductive. A martini in the evening — that’s my new thing; I’m hoping to make it my entire personality. You know: Sophisticated and adult.

So far, I like this personality with its straightforward pleasure. My heart sings at the very sight of an icy coupe glass filled to the brim with a clouded liquid, a happy row of fat olives suspended within.

Alcohol is many things and contains many contradictions. I’ve never been a big drinker, and, if you’re a regular reader of this column, you may suspect I’ve now turned to drink because this world is so full of weeping. Well, that’s not quite it. It’s true that when life is difficult, alcohol is a socially acceptable way of self-medicating for whatever ails you. Drinking alcohol is one of the joys of being an autonomous adult who decides how and where to check out of reality for a short time.

When I drink a martini, my brain calms and I relax. I even like the olives

So, what happens when I drink a martini? My brain calms, my shoulders relax, and time changes shape. Drinking alcohol is a little like drinking poison, but fun poison. Even one drink can slow down your reaction times, lower your inhibitions, and send a kind of glad giddiness pervading through your brain and body.

The latent Catholic in me wants to point out the negative repercussions of that enjoyment too, but we all know them already, and they are boring.

This column is about the best parts of the best drink out there — a gin martini, dirty, with three olives.

As a general rule, martinis are five parts gin or vodka and one part dry vermouth. You can drink it dirty, which doesn’t mean the bartender puts his thumb in the glass. Rather, it means a splash of olive brine. That’s how I like it.

I’ve tried it with a twist — a lemon peel twist, not a “And then I found out I was related to my boyfriend”-twist. Martinis with a twist are clean and delicious, but the salty tang of a dirty martini elevates the drink to another level.

I like the olives because they’re a snack, and they seem to temper the alcohol a little — they seem to, but they probably don’t. Dirty or with a twist, regardless of olives or not, martinis are strong drinks.

Bugsy Gabriel is a bartender at Barbes, a beloved neighbourhood bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The French owner, Olivier Conan, is a musician and curates an eclectic schedule of live artists playing anything from jazz to klezmer and back again. I visited Barbes at six-ish on a recent weekday, with the after-work crowd just trickling in and the music starting to play.

Gabriel is a martini man himself, and he drinks it dirty. I ask if he worries about how strong the alcohol is in a martini, and he says he doesn’t.

“That’s what I like about them. What’s cool is that you’re not going to shoot it. You can sit there, chill, sip on it slowly. It tames the instinct to knock it back.”

I like that about martinis too. Ideally, the glass and the liquor will be chilled, and the cocktail itself will be served freezing cold. There is not a lot of liquid in a martini; two and a half ounces of gin and half an ounce of vermouth is the standard. A martini is efficient, targeted, and very potent.

The equivalent amount of alcohol in, say, lager horrifies me. I’ve never understood why people enjoy all that liquid sloshing around their insides.

There is sophistication in the air around a martini. Whether or not it’s deserved, it’s there.

The great New Yorker writer and editor Roger Ansell recently died at 102. When I heard he had passed, I read through some of his vast back catalogue and came across a charming piece he wrote about martinis back in 2002. He drank them himself through the decades and marveled at how commonplace they were in 1930s America and how deadly they could be.

“We drank a lot, we loved to drink, and some of us did not survive it. Back in college, the mother of a girl I knew would sometimes fix herself a silver shaker of martinis at lunchtime and head back upstairs to bed. ‘Good night,’ she’d say. ‘Lovely to see you’.”

For all its darkness, I love that story, demonstrating as it does the power of this particular potion. I don’t plan on blotting out whole afternoons myself, but I respect the option of doing so. Besides, I am in no position to judge that woman’s private martini ritual.

Ritual

If I want to be a real grown-up, I probably need a martini ritual of my own. Ideally, I will be alone in a big city. Drinking a martini is quite like having a minor surgical procedure, and you probably shouldn’t be alone afterward, but I prefer it.

And if I’m staying in a hotel with a bar, and it must be a marble bar, with a discreet barman, I will be fine. I will sit at that bar, my room key safe in my purse, and the music and the people will fade out all around me as I drink that beautiful poison.

Then I’ll tip, drop the little stick back into the glass and float away upstairs, my mind calm, my heart light.

As for drinking a martini at home, I’m not there yet. I hope to be one day, and I know where to turn to for advice when I’m ready. In his piece, Roger Ansell writes that he began to prefer a scotch at night as he got older, and martinis took a back seat.

“But if there’s a friend tonight with the old predilection, I’ll mix up a martini for the two of us, in the way we like it, filling a small glass pitcher with ice cubes that I’ve cracked into quarters with my little pincers. Don’t smash or shatter the ice: it’ll become watery in a moment. Put three or four more cracked cubes into our glasses, to begin the chill. Put the gin or the vodka into the pitcher, then wet the neck of the vermouth bottle with a quickly amputated trickle. Stir the Martini vigorously but without sloshing. When the side of the pitcher is misted like a January windowpane pour the drink into the glasses.”

Heaven.