Solitary Gin -- For Summer Refreshment, Sip The Stuff Of Liquid Legend

"Yes, I'd like a cocktail," the lady said. "Gin."

"What kind of gin?"

"I want a gin," she mused, "that tastes like Christmas trees."

I have a fond regard for gin in its various combinations. I have also acquired a healthy respect for it.

Gin is the stuff of liquid legend - not all of it savory. It started out as a rough-hewn, raw-boned challenge to French brandy and along the way developed a few - not many - refinements.

The London artist Hogarth saw it as the source of urban tragedy.

"Drunk - For one penny.

Dead Drunk - For two pennies.

Clean Straw - For nothing," the sign over the gin mills read, and Hogarth recorded it.

Why would anyone have wanted to create a drink so potentially lethal? And for that matter, who?

The who included King William of Orange; the honor was shared by Queen Anne. The "why" was economic warfare. The two British monarchs wanted to reduce imports of wine and spirits from France - an almost perpetual enemy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Soldiers serving under the Dutch-born William had acquired a taste for Holland jenever (the French called it genievre), a highly alcoholic "medicine" flavored with juniper berries. It had been invented by either a Dutch chemist, Professor Franciscus Sylvius, and/or Franciscus de la Boe, a professor of medicine at the University of Leiden, who was trying to concoct a potent diuretic - and succeeded.

Jenever was immediately nicknamed gin. And the British began making a similarly flavored, but cruder, version from cheap grain alcohol instead of malt liquor.

It didn't have to be aged - and therefore wasn't. It still - usually - isn't.

"Gin," said restaurant proprietor Tim Firnstahl, "is basically flavored vodka. But it's delightfully flavored vodka."

Firnstahl is the president of Satisfaction Guaranteed Eateries (Jake O'Shaughnessey's, Von's, Sharp's Fresh Roasting and other area restaurants). The full, if cumbersome, name of Von's is: Von's Grand City Cafe & Martini-Manhattan Memorial. It's in the center of Seattle's midtown at 619 Pike, and it fits into this narrative because, as Firnstahl puts it:

"We sell more martinis per seat than any restaurant in America. We arrive at that statement from comparisons with national trade publications. Von's makes from scratch an average of 1,200 martinis a week. And that is a hell of a lot of martini.

"We call it two for two: a double, 2 1/4-ounce shot for two bucks. Our regulars love them. They go through them like wildfire."

Firnstahl's martinis are not exactly traditional. That is, they are far stronger - in terms of the mixture of gin to vermouth - than the classic recipes. But classic recipes have changed greatly over time. (The first martini recipe ever printed - 1862 in San Francisco - called for a shot of gin in a glass of white vermouth, shaken with a couple of cubes of ice, a dash of bitters, two dashes of maraschino liqueur and served with a wedge of lemon.)

Firnstahl's bartenders dispense their vermouth sparingly, by the eye-dropper - literally. The range is one drop of vermouth for a dry, to five drops for a "wet" martini.

"And," stipulates Firnstahl, "you should only eat the olive after the drink is half-consumed. You need the transfer of brine flavor from the olive to make the drink taste just right."

Others might argue that you need the transfer of gin into the olive to make eating the olive worthwhile.

What about the widespread practice of plunking in two huge olives?

They displace a lot of gin. If you like olives that much, purists say, you should be at a salad bar, not a cocktail bar.

Von's uses Boord's gin.

A much more substantial gin drink, if somewhat more expensive, is served at Vito's Restaurant, 927 Ninth Ave., where they assemble a formidable martini of about four ounces (and maybe more) for $3.75. I have heard that the waitresses suggest you limit yourself to two. I suggest you stop after one. This could be the most serious gin drink in Seattle. The ingredients are Gordon's London Dry Gin and imported Stock dry vermouth at a four-to-one ratio.

Gordon's is a robust, middle-of-the-road gin and one of the state's most consistent sellers (along with Monarch, for bulk purchasers - like restaurants and cocktail lounges; and Tanqueray's Special Dry, a high-proof British gin at 47.3 percent or 94.6 proof alcohol).

"Tanqueray's outsells all of our high-end gins," said my local state-liquor-store clerk. "It's bought strictly by martini drinkers."

Possibly the most heavily touted brand among gin snobs is Bombay Sapphire, another imported British gin, "distilled from 100 % Grain Neutral Spirits from a 1761 recipe," also at 94 proof, and sold at around $18-plus a fifth.

If Tanqueray seems a little perfumy to some (as it does to me), Bombay Sapphire seems overdosed - but pleasantly - with aromatic botanicals. It contains Southeast Asian almonds and licorice, Spanish lemon peel, Italian juniper berries, cubeb berries from Java, Italian iris root, Moroccan coriander seeds, Saxon (German) angelica and Asian cassia bark.

There are various ways of getting botanical flavors into gin. The herbs and bark essences can simply be added to the still after the first distillation, or they can be put into the cooling condensers as the second distillation takes place. The latter device is called a "gin head" and has nothing to do with the final consumer.

The days of the three-martini lunch are now, gratefully, past, as the days of the three-martini lunch drinkers are now frankly numbered.

I was in Paris a few weeks ago and stopped to appreciate again Degas' moving, brooding, poignant 1876 impressionist masterpiece, "Absinthe," a young woman with a bleak smile seated in a sorely functional cafe. Witnessing regular indulgence in gin has suggested to me that similar no-nonsense quality to recreational drink - not exactly joyless, but deep and chemically profound if not starkly dangerous.

A 19th-century French observer, Alfred Delvau, wrote of absinthe: "It sticks immense wings on your shoulders and you leave for a country without horizon and without frontier, but also, without poetry and without sun. You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed toward incoherence."

Gin always at least hints at that. Festive, maybe, but too swift and certain in its effects.

Churchill made his martinis with straight gin - "and a glance at the vermouth bottle,' and not only survived but led the free world through the horrors of the Second World War, writing, governing and painting nonstop.

Few of us are Churchills, however, and gin consumption, despite flares of fashion, like that of all hard liquors is declining in America. (Wine sales are up dramatically.)

Still, sometimes ...

A close friend, after a tough week, once wrote:

5 o'clock Haiku

"Perfect martini

Cold, clear inebriating,

Unblinking olive."

And set her limit forever after at one.

(COPYRIGHT 1992, JOHN HINTERBERGER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

JOHN HINTERBERGER'S FOOD COLUMNS AND RESTAURANT REVIEWS APPEAR SUNDAYS IN PACIFIC AND FRIDAYS IN TEMPO. BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER IS A SEATTLE TIMES STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.