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.

Dave started of as an aspiring musician, and it was during his time playing in bars that he first found an appreciation of cocktails. Due to the nature of the venues he was hanging out in he couldn’t order the more gaudy drinks that were popular at the time, but soon found that almost every barman was happy to mix him a dry martini. After accepting that life as a musician might not lead to fame and fortune, Dave decided to take a different path and studied for his PhD in English Literature. The next step was teaching, but he quickly realised that this was not his vocation either, so taking his skills with the English language and his love of music, he turned his hand to music journalism.

It was during his time writing about music, that a friend remembered that Dave liked to drink cocktails and asked if he wouldn’t mind doing a little piece about them for Esquire. Of course one thing led to another and soon he had a regular column and was writing for a number of publications. As anyone in the drinks industry will tell you, he is now a well establish and greatly respected authority when it comes to cocktails and his book Imbibe is considered by many to be one of the finest volumes written on the subject of classic drinks.

Dave has a rare combination of skills; he is an excellent and thorough researcher, who has uncovered remarkable facts around the heritage of many classic cocktails, but he also has the ability to present his research in an engaging way that is easy to understand and draws you into his books. For me reading Imbibe for the first time was a revelation and I found myself reading it more like a novel than a cocktail book. That takes a great deal of skill from the author.

After talking through how he got into writing and researching cocktails, I thought I should ask why he’d chosen to write his most recent book, ‘Punch: The delights (and dangers) of the flowing bowl’. It turns out that it all started with the editing of his previous book, Imbibe, which had grown a little too large and needed to have some sections trimmed down. He realised that despite the fact that there are a number of punch recipes in Jerry Thomas’ book (the book around which Imbibe is based) they were really included as a nod to the past and were coming to the end of their popularity by 1862. So the punch section was cut, but having done quite a bit of research already, Dave thought it might make an excellent starting point for a book in it’s own right. So here we have it, a book that looks at the early history of mixed drinks, and paints a picture of society in the past as seen from the punch bowl.

It’s a delightful read as well as a hugely informative one, and I can’t recommend highly enough that you buy a copy at your earliest convenience. While you’re at it, you should probably buy Imbibe too, it’s perhaps my favourite cocktail related book since Charles H Baker Jr. penned Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Glass!

So as I only had a brief time with him, I thought I’d ask Dave his thoughts on what’s happening in the modern cocktail scene. It has occurred to me recently that in the past major social, political or even natural events have been the catalysts for new eras of cocktails. The most obvious example is prohibition, which of course led to American cocktail bartenders taking their skills to Europe and led to an era of new creations using different ingredients than those available in the US. The end of WWII, is another example, as it led to tiki establishing itself as a new style of drinks that reflected the island cultures to which many American soldiers had been exposed during the war. Another example is the demise of cognac due to phylloxera in the 1860’s, which, led to an increase in popularity of Scotch. So with no major shifts in society at the moment is there a chance we’re stagnating and is this why so much of our current cocktail scene is about recapturing the ‘classics’?

Dave was quick to agree that at the moment there is a trend for looking back to previous eras, but thought that maybe this was something that was firstly very necessary, and secondly the foundation of a new era of cocktails. He went on to explain that a great deal of the artistry and craft of making cocktails had been lost during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, and that it is only recently that bartenders have started rediscovering the skills that were commonplace before then.

It’s a trend that he’s seen in other areas of society too, what with ‘hipsters’ reviving the art of handmade clothing, and people learning how to harness oxen to plough fields, as a way of shunning modern techniques. It seems that perhaps the same is happening with cocktails. Just a few years ago we were seeing modern production methods leading to new drinks (aftershock for example… shudder!) and rtd’s becoming a popular way to imbibe ‘cocktails’ for the masses. But in recent years there has been a backlash against this and we have been turning to the past to relearn skills that were commonplace 100 years ago. So maybe this isn’t an era of stagnation, but instead a time where we are learning from the past in order to be able to take cocktails forward into a new era? Only time will tell!

We got talking about how cocktail culture moves forward from where it is today, and Dave suggested that the ‘process of looking back in history at cocktails, can actually become the catalyst for change’. This is an idea that intrigued me, so he went on to explain that he is starting to see ‘the rediscovery of the craft of making cocktails, and that with globalisation and the ability to instantly share ideas, this knowledge is propelled around the world.’ This of course leads to experimentation, which hopefully will lead to us growing our own cocktail culture as opposed to simply trying to recapture the past.

Of course this led to both of us briefly bemoaning the number of ‘serious cocktail bars’ where that craft of making the drink has become more important than the social experience of having a drink and a good time. ‘There’s a time and a place for them, but sometimes you just want a beer and few laughs’ as Dave put it.

I realised that we had probably got a bit too philosophical and heavy, so as a blogger I was interested in hearing his thoughts about drinks blogs and how they fit into the cocktail landscape. We got talking about the difference between bloggers in the UK and the US. There are some fantastic blogs written in the US but as we had both experienced, you can sit in a bar in New York these days and strike up a conversation with 10 different people who have their own blog. In the UK there are a lot less of us writing about cocktails and spirits, which means we have a smaller voice but perhaps each blog is also less diluted by the competition.

The danger with blogs in Dave’s opinion is that they are all too often one person’s opinion, stated as fact. They can be great for starting a conversation or debate, but equally they can also spread incorrect information. In fact we both got on our soap boxes about blogs that simply regurgitate press releases, or get their information second hand and don’t have their own opinions. Likewise the bloggers who simply have their blog in the hopes of getting free bottles of booze sent to them, or being invited to brand sponsored events. Hopefully Dave wasn’t sat there, thinking that bitters&twisted falls into either of those categories.

So to lighten things up at the end of our chat I asked Dave two more questions:

If you could only have one spirit for the rest of your life what would it be?

- ‘Ether’ (that was said very much tongue in cheek, for the record)

If you could have any cocktail made by any person, living or dead, what would it be?

- ‘A martini made by whoever invented it so I could shake them by the hand’

So on that note, I’ll sign off but not before encouraging you, once again, to purchase both Punch and Imbibe. I the meantime, I’ll raise a glass of punch inspired by Courvoisier and Mr Wondrich, the recipe for which is below.

IMBIBATIOUS PUNCH

In a punch bowl combine the peel from 2 lemons and 2 oranges (thin peel with as little white pith on them as possible) with 1 cup of fine-grained sugar and gently bruise the peels into the sugar. Add 350ml of hot water and stir to dissolve, before adding 200ml of fresh orange juice and 150ml lemon juice. To this delicious mixture add an entire bottle of Courvoisier Exclusif and another 200ml of cold water as well as plenty of ice. A grating of fresh (and only fresh!) nutmeg over the top of the bowl completes the preparation, and all that remains is to drink it in good company!