LABEL NO RULE 1-36-4 on bond's favorite

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By GREG MORAGO
HARTFORD COURANT
"Shaken, not stirred."
Ah, the very words -- as recognizable and assertive as, well, a dry martini.
Except James Bond's favorite libation, a shaken vodka martini, isn't really a martini after all. As any martini purist will tell you, Bond (despite his elegant tuxedo and debonair double-agent demeanor) makes two egregious cocktail errors: using vodka instead of gin, and shaking the drink instead of stirring.
Double bad for 007.
Or is it?
"I will shake it if they want me to. I'm not going to tell someone how to drink their martini," says New York's Dale DeGroff, a career bartender whom many consider the world's authority on cocktails. "But for myself, I want a gin martini stirred. The classicist still orders them that way."
It's not that the Bond martini is bad -- after all, today's cocktail culture prefers a vodka martini over the classic gin version. It's just that the Bondtini is a little show-offy, verging on the vulgar.
"It's tacky," says Jose Arbona, a bartender at the venerable Oak Bar at the Plaza hotel in New York. "He does it for the sole purpose of disputing the tradition. For him, it's his way of saying, 'I'm going to do it my way."'
His way, indeed. From the outset, the Bond martini has been a curiously ostentatious thing. Ian Fleming gives the recipe for Bond's favorite tipple in "Casino Royale":
"Just a moment," Bond tells the barkeep. "Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, a half measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?"
Bond names this drink the Vesper, in honor of the beautiful double-agent Vesper Lynd. In many Bond circles, the drink is known as the Vesper.
Still, it's not a classic 'tini. Neither are the other vodka stingers Bond sips on film: a Smirnoff martini in "Dr. No," a vodka and Cinzano martini in "Thunderball," a Russian vodka martini made with Noilly Prat in "You Only Live Twice," and plain vodka cocktails in "GoldenEye."
For a character of such refined taste (so knowledgable about the world of spirits and wine, he is able to expose two waiters as assassins when they fail to identify Chateau Mouton-Rothschild '55 as a claret in the film "Diamonds Are Forever"), how does one explain this cocktail oddity of Bond's?
"It's just a quirk of his," says respected food writer John Mariani, who wrote a piece about Bond food and drink for this month's Wine Spectator. "It's silly, but rather cool."
And perhaps cool, as in icy cold, is exactly what Bond was going for.
"Shaken gets the drink colder," says David Geiseng, head bartender at Lucky's Lounge, a cocktail den at the Mohegan Sun casino. "Today, martinis are shaken unless they ask for them stirred. Diehard martini drinkers are very picky, though. They order them how they want them."
Indeed, cocktails, even martinis, are all over the place. Vodka martinis now sport all sort of froufrou: sour apple flavor, chocolate, caramel, raspberry and even mint flavors -- heresy to the drinkers of the classic gin martini (stirred, not shaken).
"The martini has come to mean something else these days," says DeGroff, the master mixologist whose new book, "The Craft of the Cocktail," has just been released. "The classic martini is fading slightly. It's always been an evolving drink. It's still evolving."
But to gin martini drinkers, there is something wholly wrong about Bond's martini. First, there's the issue of vodka. Second, there is the problem with shaking. A shaken martini, while colder than a stirred martini, aerates or "bruises" the gin. Little shards of ice, created by the vigorous shaking, also get through the strainer and into the martini glass, which eventually waters down the drink. Third, a shaken martini dissolves the vermouth, robbing the drinker of the familiar vermouth slick.
Carlos Villalobos, bartender at the Bar at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston, makes a legendary martini as famous for its taste and mouth-feel as it is for the precise, almost clinical approach to creating them. Villalobos' martini is "stirred 12 times, not 11 or 13."
DeGroff agrees that the classic gin martini must be stirred not shaken. "You want the martini heavy, silky and cold," he says. "That's what you get when you stir properly."
Shaking, DeGroff says, produces effervescent air bubbles that aerate the alcohol. While this helps spread flavors across the tongue quickly, it isn't proper for a martini. His rule about shaking and stirring is simple: "If you have spirits only, stir. If you have fruit juices and other sweet ingredients along with spirits, shake."
With "Die Another Day" in the theaters, the Bond martini is certainly on the mind. But Bond is poised to throw another curveball within his cocktail culture. His drink of choice in "Die Another Day"? It appears to be the Cuban Mojito. One can only hope that he doesn't try to make it with vodka instead of rum.