How to make the perfect martini

The sad fact is that I know exactly how to make a dry martini but I can’t drink them because, two years ago, I discovered I was diabetic. I prefer one with gin, but James Bond liked a vodka martini, “shaken not stirred” – which I never said, by the way. That was Sean Connery, remember him?

The worst martini I’ve ever had was in a club in New Zealand, where the barman poured juice from a bottle of olives into the vodka. That’s called a dirty martini and it is a dirty, filthy, rotten martini, and should not be drunk by anybody except condemned prisoners.

My dry martinis taste amazing and the day they tell me I’ve got 24 hours to live I am going to have six. Here’s how I make them:

1. For a gin martini, use Tanqueray – it’s a soft gin and the best. Put an eggcup measure of Noilly Prat dry vermouth into a V-shaped martini glass and swirl it around to flavour the glass. Then tip the Noilly Prat into the cocktail shaker, swirl it around and throw away what’s left.

2. Put a couple of ice cubes into the shaker and add your measure of gin. Ideally, there should be a quarter of an inch of space between the top of the liquid and the top of the glass. If it is up to the rim, it could spill.

3. Give the cocktail mixer a little shake – don’t exhaust yourself – and then put it in the freezer.

4. Cut a slice of lemon and wipe the rim of the glass with the yellow zest (not the white pith), and put the glass in the freezer.

5. Half an hour later you are ready to pour. A proper cocktail shaker has a strainer so the ice cubes remain in it. Funnily enough, the silver shaker we use at our home in Monaco has 007 on it.

6. Serve with three little olives on a toothpick dunked in the drink. That way, if I happen to be with you, I can eat one of the olives and enjoy just the suspicion of a dry martini.

Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet