Capitoline Red Vermouth 750ml

Capitoline began in the mid-2000s within the Italian restaurant world of Washington, D.C., when Etto's Peter Pastan and bar manager Kat Hamidi started experimenting with house-made vermouth. Years of tinkering led to the brand's official 2015 launch, making it the first commercially available vermouth produced in the District. Red Vermouth was made by hand in small batches at New Columbia Distillers, the Ivy City home of Green Hat Gin, where Hamidi and Pastan crafted their early collection of local, wine-forward vermouths.

Red Vermouth starts with an AVA-certified blended white wine sourced from Santa Barbara, a deliberate choice that put the quality of the base wine on equal footing with the botanicals rather than treating it as a neutral backdrop. That wine is fortified with grape spirit infused with thirteen select botanicals, including clove, nutmeg, Seville orange, rosemary, sage, and coriander, built to highlight the wine's own character rather than mask it with heavy sweetness.

The result carries warm baking spice and tangy red fruit, with punchy orange zest layered over herbal notes of rosemary and sage. It leans citrusy and slightly bitter rather than syrupy, a style Hamidi has described as intentionally wine-centric.