Seeking Martini Perfection on the Campaign Trail I WASN'T prepared to find martini perfection in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, strip mall. Maybe my excitement had something to do with low expectations. Or maybe it was the long workday, which closed with a two-hour "Faith, Family and Freedom" town hall hosted by Rick Santorum. He is not known for brevity. But with that first sip from the bar at Vino's Ristorante, it didn't matter where I was. This was an exceptional gin martini. It was cold, clean and crisp, shaken just enough so there was a small island of ice shavings floating at the top. The pour was generous but not too much so, stopping just short of the lip of the glass so none would spill over. The gin, Boodles, was an unexpected find in a restaurant sharing a parking lot with a Play It Again Sports and Godfather's Pizza. I rarely come across Boodles, an airy 90.4-proof British spirit with a hint of coriander, at bars in Manhattan. So when the waitress listed it as one of the options among the more conventional brands like Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire, I couldn't say no. At $9, the price was right. I'd easily paid $10 more than that for a martini in some hotel bars. I had my Vino's martini two days into a bold reportorial experiment. As a political correspondent for this newspaper, I decided as part of my campaign-trail duty to sample as many martinis across the country as I could, mostly after working hours. The Republican primary calendar took me from Iowa to New Hampshire, then to South Carolina, Florida and on to Michigan. That's where I had my final martini in this self-assigned project, an expertly poured Beefeater one. It was a simple and satisfying number from the Motor Bar in the handsomely restored Westin Book Cadillac in downtown Detroit. What I would come to discover over the course of this two-month assignment is that the martini is a blessedly stateless entity, created equally well in the shakers of bartenders from Manchester, N.H., to Miami. Maybe it spoke to my utter lack of sophistication, but as long as the proportions were right, as long the bartender understood the word "dry," I was happy. For the sake of sample consistency, my order was always the same: one gin martini, very dry, shaken, with a twist. I wasn't partial to any particular gin, though I found myself mostly ordering Hendrick's, a cucumber- and rose-infused Scottish brand that has become to gin what Grey Goose is to vodka in most bars: the ubiquitous top-shelf brand. When I was in the mood for something with a more unadorned taste, I would go for Beefeater or Plymouth, if it was available. Not that there weren't the occasional mixological mishaps. At the bar at the downtown Des Moines Marriott, my martini arrived with a lemon twist and olives. A restaurant in New Hampshire served an editor friend of mine his martini in a wineglass. It did not stop him from gulping it down. Then there was the time in a Sioux City, Iowa, hotel bar when a columnist from another publication ordered a martini and the bartender looked at him utterly stumped. She had been on the job just a few weeks, she said, lowering her head. Luckily, she was both patient and gracious enough to follow his meticulous instructions: fill a shaker with ice, put in half a capful of vermouth and top it off with Beefeater. We made out just fine. Many purists insist that the vodka concoctions popular with martini drinkers today are an affront to the drink's heritage. The one true way to drink a martini, they say, is with gin and dry vermouth. I always opt for shaken over stirred, not out of any homage to James Bond, but because as a practical matter shaking makes the drink colder. And some bartenders will tell you the bruising that occurs when the ice smashes around helps release more flavor. Of course some will tell you the opposite, that bruising is a bad idea. Over the course of my travels, some bartenders got a little carried away with the shaking. They shattered so much ice that you ended up with a drink more resembling a 7-Eleven Slurpee than something fit for Winston Churchill. His signature beverage, as lore has it, was gin, no vermouth, served icy cold. Instead of vermouth, which became scarce during World War II, he would bow in the direction of France. I found my request for very dry martinis mostly heeded. At Soby's, a modern Southern-cuisine restaurant in downtown Greenville, S.C., the bartender said to me: "Very dry. So do you even want me to look at the bottle of vermouth? Excellent question. And to make my sample as broad as possible, I ordered in as many different kinds of establishments as I could, aiming for the ideal mix of high and low. In South Carolina, I headed for the Thoroughbred Club at the famed Charleston Place hotel, a monument to old world Southern decadence, where I bumped into Newt and Callista Gingrich late on the Friday night before he pulled off a 12-point victory in the South Carolina primary. He insisted the conversation he gamely struck up with me and my partner, Brendan, be off the record. But I feel no betrayal of journalistic ethics by reporting that his drink of choice appeared to be Scotch on the rocks, while Ms. Gingrich gingerly sipped a hearty pour of white wine. It was a different setting entirely from the bar in the north concourse at the Omaha airport, where I was given Bombay in a nine-ounce plastic cup. While I might have been able to quibble with the presentation, I couldn't complain about the liquid contents. The bartender who poured me a Plymouth martini at the Loews Don CeSar in St. Pete Beach, Fla., came closest to summing up the drink wisdom revealed in my two-month investigation. I complimented her on a job well done. There was no violent jostling of the shaker, just a gentle rattling for 20 seconds or so that left my drink cold enough to the last sip. To ensure it was dry, she poured a little vermouth into an empty, chilled glass and then shook it out, leaving just the traces. "It's so simple," she said. But then again people mess up simple all the time.