Brass Tacks With Schustack: David Wondrich
"I pretty much liked them all, particularly if I could find a story to go with them."
To borrow a bit from David Letterman, my next Brass Tacks With Schustack guest needs little introduction.
In 2007, when my drinks writing career was still in pupa mode, David Wondrich’s then new book Imbibe! was one of the first of its kind. Can you imagine an era when there were only a handful of new books about cocktails that had been written since the 1980s—when the publication of any new cocktail book was an event because there were so few of them available?
This was that era, and it was one of them. Cocktail books had already been around for centuries, but a retrospective, academic approach to cocktail history and culture was received as a radical concept. You could find out what it was like to get a drink from a bartender who was behind the stick more than a century ago, and the ways the techniques that were applied then still, and should, apply to drink making. You could find out what the hell gomme syrup actually is, and be inspired to make your own.
Dave and I have become more acquainted over the years. I first interviewed him in 2017 for New York Cocktails, and in late 2021, he was kind enough to write the foreword to Drink Like a Local New York. The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails, a mammoth compendium which he co-edited, had just been put to bed (after what probably felt like several nights in a row of all night benders), so I was shocked and delighted that he would agree to write yet another word about anything, drink related or not. It was a generous thing to do. Dave is a generous guy. He’s a real mensch.
And he agreed to do this too. Thank you, Dave. I owe you a couple of rounds!
Amanda Schuster: What inspired you to start delving into the history of cocktails? Was there a particular event that was the “I should write about alcoholic beverages!” moment?
David Wondrich: Somebody asked me to, and that ask came with a check. At the end of 1999, my friend Josh Mack, who had recently become the director of new media—that is, Internet stuff—for Hearst magazines, had been tasked with putting the drinks section from Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts online. He had the section transcribed, but it wasn’t organized in a way that made sense on the web and had too many recipes, few of them detailed enough to be easily mixable. He needed somebody to whip it into shape. At the time, I was a junior English Lit professor out on Staten Island, but he knew I liked old cocktails and could use the money (again, junior English Lit professor), so he asked me if I could do it. I had enough on my plate so I said no, but then he mentioned the size of the check and that no became a quick yes.
Once I started on the project, I found that some of the drinks from the book came with little Esquire-style intros and some didn’t. I started writing a few in similar style for the more important drinks that didn’t, adding in whatever historical info I could root out for them, and found it goddamn amusing work. Apparently so did my editor at Esquire, Brendan Vaughan, who even after the Esquire Drinks Database was launched (that was in February or March, 2000), suggested that I write similar headnotes for the rest of the drinks, as a Drink of the Week column for the website; that, too, came with a check. I was hooked.
AS: Did you have to remap your career path entirely or was writing about drinks something that was an extension of what was already your professional trajectory?
DW: Well, yes and no. Mostly yes, since my career path was teach college—write academic papers and books about stuff like genre theory and representation and metaphor and whatnot—get tenure—die, which to be honest didn’t seem like a whole lot of fun to me but it was what I could do. But also no, since my dissertation involved analyzing a whole bunch of poems from Antiquity through the Renaissance that tried to present technical subjects—farming, astrology, atomic theory, fishing, whatever—poetically, so people might actually care about them. It was fun to put all that study into practice, using the fine art of mixing drinks.
AS: Was there a particular cocktail or style of cocktail that initially drew you in?
DW: Not really. I pretty much liked them all, particularly if I could find a story to go with them.
AS: Is there a cocktail that you came to love over the years that you didn’t like when you were first writing about drinks? Similarly, is there one that has never been able to win you over no matter how well it’s made?
DW: El Presidente (see recipe at the end) used to depress the hell out of me, until I figured out that it was supposed to be made with a semi-sweet blanc or bianco vermouth, and not a standard sweet or dry one. Now I love it. But I will always loathe a Banana Daiquiri, simply because I loathe bananas.
AS: You have a background in music. Are there specific spirits or other ingredients that you think of like instruments in a band (i.e. this is the bass player, this one keeps rhythm, etc)?
DW: I don’t think about rhythm in cocktails—I don’t know how to—but I do think about harmony; about how the various ingredients fit together to, I hope, produce sort of a full spectrum of sound. Things like dark rum, rye and cognac I think of as filling the bass register, with maybe gin and light rum in the midrange and bitters and citrus shading up into the treble. It’s not an exact, this-is-that correspondence, but it can be helpful.
AS: Similarly, is there a cocktail that you always associate with a certain song or band?
DW: There’s a cocktail I sometimes make—okay, it’s really more of a shooter—that’s equal parts Ardbeg or other smoky Scotch and Braulio or Fernet or other intense amaro, shaken up with ice and strained, that always reminds me of “Ace of Spades” by Mötorhead. Jeez, I want one now. I don’t want to live forever!
AS: What's the craziest factoid you discovered when editing The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails?
DW: That American rye whiskey was invented by Germans.
AS: When I was chatting with you for New York Cocktails over boilermakers at the Brooklyn Inn in 2017, you gave me the best writing advice. You said no matter what, I should find my own voice and stick with it. Things have changed a lot out there since then. Do you have any new advice for someone who is starting out in drinks writing in 2024?
DW: Yeah: be an algorithm. Seriously, though, with AI chomping up all the little jobs I think now more than ever the only thing you have to sell is your voice and your obsessions; things that are instantly recognizable as human, which you can do like nobody else can.
AS: Someone asked me this question recently, but I’d love to know your answer too: if you could travel back in time to any bar, which one would you go to, and what would you order? (You can read my answer here.)
DW: Okay, then—I would pop over to James Ashley’s London Punch House, in 1759, for a glass of Rack Punch with James Boswell, and then zoom ahead to 1892 where I’d have the great Ciro Capozzi make me a Caricature Cocktail at Ciro’s Bar in Monte Carlo. I might have to stop on the way for one of Jerry Thomas’s Brandy Juleps, but if three stops aren’t allowed, well, I’d make them anyway.
AS: Anything else you'd like readers to know?
DW: I’ve just finished the Comic Book History of the Cocktail, beautifully drawn by Brooklyn’s own Dean Kotz and due out next spring from Ten Speed Press. It’s like the old Classics Comics, but with drinks.
Well that sounds pretty awesome. And now I’m thirsty for El Presidente! Thank you, David.
El Presidente
From Signature Cocktails by Amanda Schuster (Phaidon, 2023)
This is a cocktail from Hotel Inglaterra in Havana, Cuba. The first mention in print dates back to 1915 with Manual del Cantinero by John B. Escalante. It was popularized in the U.S. in the 1930s by bartender Eddie Woelke after returning from Cuba following Prohibition.
1 ½ oz (45 ml) gold or dark rum
¾ oz (22 ml) vermouth blanc
½ oz (15 ml) orange curaçao
1 barspoon grenadine
Garnish: orange peel (expressed and discarded); cocktail cherry (optional, but so good!)
Stir the ingredients in a cocktail glass with ice until well chilled. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Express the oils from a piece of orange peel into the drink, skin side down, then discard. Add the cherry, if using.
Wondrich on Substack!