Vermouth

Vermouth is a wine, flavored with aromatic herbs and spices ("aromatized" in the trade) in recipes that are closely-guarded trade secrets. Vermouths are also sweetened as the flavor is very bitter without it. The inventor of vermouth, Antonio Benedetto Carpano from Turin, Italy, chose this name in 1786 because he was inspired by a German wine flavored with wormwood, a herb most famously used in distilling absinthe. The modern German word Wermut (Wermuth in the spelling of Carpano's time) means both wormwood and vermouth. The herbs were originally used to mask raw flavors of cheap wine, imparting a slightly medicinal "tonic" flavor.