“Spain's Sunday aperitif hour carries a German forest herb in its name”
Wormwood is a bitter silvery herb, Artemisia absinthium, that grows across Central Europe and the Mediterranean. German physicians of the 16th century steeped it in wine as a digestive tonic, calling the drink 'Wermut,' from the Old High German name 'wermuota' for the plant. The same herb appears in ancient Egyptian medical papyri, in medieval monastery herb gardens, and in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, who prescribed it for stomach ailments around 1150.
In 1786, Antonio Benedetto Carpano opened a shop near the Piazza Castello in Turin and began selling a sweetened wine infused with wormwood and other botanicals. He called it 'vermouth,' adapting the German 'Wermut' to Italian spelling and pronunciation. The drink spread through Piedmont's coffeehouses quickly, and by the 1820s French producers in Chambéry had developed a drier, paler style under the same name.
Barcelona took to vermouth in the late 19th century. Catalan merchants adopted the drink and its name, writing it 'vermut' in Catalan orthography. By the early 20th century, the vermut hour had become a Barcelona institution: around noon on Sundays, between church and the main meal, workers and bourgeois alike sat at marble-topped bars drinking it cold with olives and anchovies. The ritual was called 'fer el vermut,' doing the vermouth.
The tradition all but disappeared during the Franco era, displaced by beer and spirits. It revived in Barcelona in the 2000s, rebranded as a retro sophistication. Bars in the Gràcia and El Born neighborhoods began serving 'vermut de grifo,' vermouth on tap, often house-made with local herbs. Today Spain is among Europe's largest producers and consumers of vermouth, and the Catalan word 'vermut' carries both the German wormwood and forty years of disappearance inside its two syllables.
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In 21st-century Spain, vermut names both a drink and a time of day. 'Quedamos para el vermut?' means let us meet at noon on Sunday, whether or not vermouth is actually served. The word has become a social appointment, a gap in the week, a specific quality of late-morning light in a bar. Its German origin in a medicinal herb is entirely invisible in this use.
The wormwood in modern commercial vermouth is usually present in trace quantities, far below what 16th-century German physicians prescribed. But the name preserves the original ingredient faithfully. As a botanist might put it: Artemisia absinthium is still in every glass, even when you cannot taste it.
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