When “Imbibe!” by cocktail expert and historian David Wondrich was published in 2007, it created a sensation in the drink world and won a James Beard Award.
Subtitled “From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar”, the book both anticipated and fueled the American cocktail revolution and became a sacred text for serious bartenders
The updated and revised edition of “Imbibe!” (Perigee, $26.50) adds more detail about 19th century spirits, expands on the story of Thomas's life, and features many important cocktails not covered in the original edition.
The ever jovial Wondrich will be in Atlanta this weekend as a presenter at the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival . I caught up with him by telephone last week. Here's most of what we talked about.
The most obvious question: Why did you decide to revise and update “Imbibe”?
I wrote it on the cusp of the modern cocktail revolution really taking off, around 2008 or 2009. The book came out at the end of 2007, when we just getting the second wave of craft cocktail bars in New York and San Francisco. But there were still very few. And when I wrote it, there wasn’t the whole vast army of tattooed, bearded, gartered bartenders who would make a version of every 19th century drink using about five kinds of amaro and housemate bitters. None of that was in place.
The conditions the book was there to address have kind of become irrelevant over the last five years, and so I thought it might be time to update. Plus, you know, I found a lot of further information that changed my opinions on things and filled in things that were blank. All the products were different. I spent a lot of time in the first edition helping people through workarounds of ingredients that were no longer available. Now they’re all available again. You don’t need a workaround. So I decided to use that space to add new information. Basically, it was to update the book to acknowledge how much had changed since it came out.
Q. Were there corrections to be made?
There were many corrections. Like moving the Tom Collins into the chapter that I said it was in. Bonehead mistakes like that. You always make boneheaded mistakes as a writer, especially if you’re trying to do anything complicated. And the book is pretty complicated.
Q. And you said you changed your opinion on some things?
I kind of underestimated the importance of the Mint Julep in the first edition. But I’ve come to realize how foundational it was in American drink and how much older it was than we thought.
Q. The Mint Julep has a certain connotation, like Southerners drinking it at the Kentucky Derby, right?
But you know the funny is, the Southerners drinking it at the Kentucky Derby, if their ancestors could see them they’d slap those drinks right out of their hands. Because no Southern gentleman would drink a whiskey Julep. I’m sorry. That’s just wrong by antebellum standards. You drank brandy or Madeira and sherry. Anything imported and fancy like that. Whiskey was for rubes and roughnecks. Of course, that changed. Bourbon Juleps came in after the Civil War, when Southerners could no longer afford all the French brandy they imported.
Q. Getting back to our times, is there a backlash against craft cocktails?
If there’s a backlash, it’s a very affectionate one. I’m very glad that you can go into a bar now where they know how to stir a drink and they have all the ingredients. Some of the concoctions that people are coming up with are a bit much for my taste. But, you know, I’m old. And those drinks aren’t really aimed at me. It’s the same thing that you see in the food world. Chefs are cooking for other chefs. You see the same thing in cocktails. There’s no other way to move things forward, I guess. But at the same time it can be a bit dismaying. People don’t need to use beet juice in cocktails. It tastes like dirt.
Q. You’ve spent some time in Atlanta and around the South. What do you see happening here?
Some really charming cities are even more charming because you can go and get a really good cocktail. That’s always a nice way to take the temperature of a city. Drop into the nice cocktail bar and see what’s going on there. Atlanta has a lot of wonderful bartenders who are pushing things along.
Q. What will you be doing at Atlanta Food & Wine Festival this year?
I’m going to be talking with Chuck Reece from Bitter Southerner and Tiffanie Barriere of One Flew South about black bartenders in the South. It turns out there’s a pretty much unrecognized history, especially in the 19th century, of these absolutely masterful black bartenders. This was happening in a time that in the North they were not allowed to work, at least not in first class saloons that had a white clientele. In the South it was completely different in places like D.C., Richmond, Augusta, and riverboats up and down the Mississippi. There were bartenders like John Dabney, who was just a titan. But the history is hard to get at.
Q. What kinds of drinks are we talking about?
They were masters of the Mint Julep. These elaborate kind of communal versions of the Julep were a big specialty.
Q. So we are back to the Julep. Should we just introduce you as David ‘Mint Julep’ Wondrich now?
I would be OK with that. I don’t think there’s any better drink in the world than a proper antebellum Mint Julep. It’s a special piece of American heritage that needs to be rediscovered. It’s complicated. There was a whole craft to making a Julep that’s different from just making a cocktail. You have be set up properly and you have to use expensive ingredients. It was a luxury drink. But when you do it right, it’s pretty spectacular.
Credit: Bob Townsend
Credit: Bob Townsend
About the Author
