Martinis and trade policy

Or: Where exactly is that vermouth from?



At a party last night, I came across a remarkable artifact. We were plumbing the depths of an ancient liquor cabinet to find the ingredients for dry martinis (according to Kingsley Amis, 15 parts gin to one part vermouth, chill, add a cocktail onion, and promptly fall over drunk). We came across the bottle pictured above. It contained what appeared to be a standard brand of dry mermouth, long since undrinkable, that had been made since 1884 by Distillerie Stock, S.p.A. in Trieste, Italy. That in and of itself is completely unremarkable.

What was incredible, at least to my post-trade-liberalization mind, which blithely accepts products shipped in from every corner of the world to my local convenience store, were these lines on the front label:

COMPOUNDED WHITH (sic) IMPORTED INGREDIENTS
TO THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN FORMULA
PRODUCED AND BOTTLED IN NEW ZEALAND
FOR
DISTILLERIE STOCK (N.Z.) LIMITED
AUCKLAND

In other words, this bottle was a pre-1984 relic. As I have mentioned earlier, before the Fourth Labour Government liberalized the economy, there were extremely high barriers to importing anything that could be produced or assembled in New Zealand. Essentially, if a domestic firm could make something, they could apply to have imports of it virtually prohibited. But those firms could still import the materials needed to assemble the finished product.

That's evidently what was done in this case. This "Kiwi-made" vermouth would have started out as vermouth concentrate in Trieste, shipped halfway around the world, and then "compounded" with local water and decanted into (perhaps locally-made?) bottles.

A further twist presents itself, however. In the lower right corner of the label, in almost unreadable letters, there's the phrase: "PRINTED IN ITALY". The label itself was made in Italy and shipped overseas to New Zealand, a country that had a domestic paper industry and would have been perfectly capable of printing its own labels. At this point, I'm envisioning ships steaming back and forth, carrying little cardboard boxes, each one full of a vermouth assembly kit containing the labels, the bottle, the cap, and a small measure of concentrated vermouth. Just add water!

And on each end, slightly perplexed workers: Italian print-shops wondering why they are printing labels that explain that the vermouth was made in New Zealand when everybody knows that it actually comes from Italy. And bottling-plant workers in Auckland who perhaps occasionally reflected upon the strangeness of their assembly job - and who would have almost certainly been among the 76,000 Kiwi manufacturing workers to lose their jobs after the post-1984 reforms.