bringing drinks to life

It’s not every day you get to sit down with the author of one of your all time favourite cocktail books and have a chat, so when the kind folks at Courvoisier invited me to meet David Wondrich, I jumped at the chance! He was in London as their guest as part of their ongoing association with punch, which of course is the title of his most recent book. Now I’m sure that most people when offered an interview with an author and drinks historian do their homework and prepare a detailed list of questions… I however took a different approach. I arrived unprepared and decided just to see where the conversation led.

So below you won’t find an interview as such, but more of a collection of thoughts and quotes from a very pleasant morning spent chatting about everything from ploughing fields with oxen, to drinking ether. But let me start with a little background about Mr Wondrich and how he came to be a cocktail historian and author. Unsurprisingly this was not a chosen career path but more of a direction that life happened to take him in.

I’ve just realised that I am probably (no probably about it!) a fully-fledged cocktail geek (a suspicion I’ve had for some time actually!). Having taken a look at my bookcase it seems to be rather overloaded with cocktail books, with very few books on any other subject. That’s ok though, taking a look at them, I realise that they chart my journey from ‘casually interested in drinks’ to ‘make my own bitters’. A journey any fellow cocktail geek will recognise!