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Nuances of the Cocktail;  A Toast to 200 Years Of Cocktails

By William Weir, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

May 9, 2006 -- Much of the cocktail's appeal comes from just being in the know - knowing the right glass, the right jargon, the right grade of ice (rocks, shaved or crushed? Which grade of crushed?).

A bartender caught unawares can kill your cocktail buzz instantly. That's why Jacki Anderson devotes a day to just the nuances of the cocktail at the Boston Bartenders School of America in Windsor.

"We need 2 ounces of the primary spirits," she says, holding up a glass. "What's the primary spirit here?" The aspiring barkeeps rifle through their notes.

What's so important about the cocktail? Glad you asked. This Saturday marks the 200th anniversary of the cocktail (well, kind of; more on that later). Marking the occasion will be the opening of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New York; it already has a Las Vegas location.

Cocktail Trivia #1: Sherwood Anderson, who wrote "Winesburg, Ohio," died in 1941 after swallowing not just his martini, but its olive and toothpick as well.

Cocktail historians (of which there is no shortage) emphasize that it isn't just a drink; it's an icon of a culture. Sip that Gibson, and you're taking in more than vermouth, lemon and gin. You become part of a phenomenon that has shaped social movements and fashion, spawned tourist industries and given the world its first truly American beverage.

"There's the culture behind it, the image," says David Wondrich, author of "Killer Cocktails: An Intoxicating Guide to Sophisticated Drinking." A cocktail - a real one, he says, not one of those college drinks - proffers "instant adulthood" to its drinker. "The gin martini, you have to handle it with respect. It's a sign of instant sophistication or urbanity."

Or, as beverage historian Anistatia Miller puts it, "the cocktail goes beyond the liquid." She goes so far as to credit cocktails to some of the most important discussions in history.

"Think of the Algonquin Round Table. Look at all that beautiful sarcasm and writing," says Miller, who, along with her husband, Jared Brown, is a co-founder of the cocktail museum. "People would get together and start talking about politics, or what they had just written about," she says.

Cocktail Trivia #2: James Bond's request notwithstanding, asking a bartender to shake your martini is like asking a chef to cook a steak well-done. They'll do it, but not happily. Shaking "bruises" and dilutes the liquor and makes it look cloudy in the glass.

As far as the anniversary goes, this Saturday actually marks the first time a clear definition of the cocktail appeared in print - in the Hudson, N.Y., publication Balance and Columbian Repository. For decades, it was thought to be the first time the word appeared at all in reference to drinks, but Wondrich discovered an earlier appearance late last year. Luckily, the reference was vague enough that it may not have referred specifically to the cocktail we know today, and plans for the 200th festivities forged ahead.

There are a lot of theories about the word's origin. Wondrich believes that it's because a mixed-breed horse was referred to as a cocktail, and the cocktail is a mixed drink.

How many cocktails are there? An almost infinite number, with new ones being made every day. Very few will be around next year, let alone for the ages. Your gin rickeys, martinis and Manhattans will always be around, and Anderson teaches them in depth at the school. Whether today's hits - the el Chupacabras, the oatmeal cookie, anything with pomegranate juice - will stand the test of time remains to be seen. Anderson touches on some of newer ones in class, but why spend too much time on something that could soon be obsolete?

Dimly lit, with classic rock playing from a stereo, the classroom is virtually identical to your typical bar. Enough so, says Anderson, that she's had people wander in looking to get served. They'd be disappointed; the "liquor" here is just colored water.

"We teach recipes. It's like baking a cake," Anderson says, as the nine students behind the bar practice getting the salt around the rim of their margarita glasses just right.

Cocktail Trivia #3: Happy with your Bacardi cocktail? Thank the Supreme Court. In the 1930s, it ruled that bars ran afoul of the law when they substituted cheaper rum.

"The Return of the Cocktail" is one of those lifestyle stories you can expect to see every few years, so a little skepticism is understandable. But Miller says it has really been inching its way back to its glory days since the 1980s, when Gen X-ers rebelled against the beer and wine of their Boomer parents, opting instead for the retro-cool of cocktails.

"They wanted to know what a Gibson really was," she says. "They were rediscovering the whole idea of going out and how cool it was to dress up in little cocktail dresses."

Television's "Sex and the City" and its obsession with Cosmopolitans only continued the cocktail's return to cultural relevance.

Sex and the cocktail, by the way, are closely entwined for a few reasons. Part of it goes back to the days when bars first started admitting women, who generally preferred to sweeten their alcohol with fruit juice. Until then, bars were mostly beer and whiskey joints. Social barriers fell, and night life formed. And, of course, there are the drink names - Sex on the Beach, Between the Sheets, etc. - a tradition that Miller says took off the 1960s and 1970s.

The cocktail has now gained enough zeitgeistian oomph that studying it is a career choice in itself. Smirnoff recently advertised for a "cocktail consultant," a job that comes with a $50,000 salary and a $50,000 expense account and involves traveling to major cities to identify the latest trends.

This is no small thing for a drink rebounding from "two major disasters," Miller says. Prohibition smote the cocktail in a big way. By its repeal in 1933, many of the best bartenders had died, and people had forgotten what a good cocktail tasted like, let alone how to make one.

"Prohibition was horrible," Wondrich says. "It wiped out a whole school of epicurean tippling."

World War II compounded cocktail woes by making it all but impossible to find quality spirits.

Cocktail Trivia #4: The daiquiri was invented in the late 1890s, possibly by an American engineer named Jennings Cox. Ernest Hemingway made it famous, drinking them regularly in Havana while writing "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

There's still a ways to go. Cocktail lovers would like nothing more than for their drink to gain the same cachet as wine. As it is, they suffer the condescension of the wine crowd. And while wine has the Oscar-winning "Sideways," cocktails have, uh, "Cocktail" with Tom Cruise, a movie that elicits groans and even genuine animus among the cocktail-igentsia. (It doesn't play much better among the bartending crowd; the students in Windsor treated it with indifference; the female bartenders-to-be cited "Coyote Ugly," though, as an inspiration.)

But Miller is confident that the art of mixing a drink will gain the same respect as cooking fine cuisine. Once afforded its due, she says, cocktails with dinner will become commonplace.

Cocktail Trivia #5: It was the late Donato D. "Duke" Antone, a headmaster of the Bartending School of Mixology in Hartford and a resident of West Hartford, who created the Harvey Wallbanger, supposedly named for a California surfer who kept banging into walls. Antone was also responsible for the Rusty Nail, Flaming Caeser, Duke Cocktail and the Italian Fascination.

The cocktail has already made celebrities of some bartenders (known in cocktail argot as mixologists). Audrey Saunders in New York is known nationally for her concoctions, for example. Miller wants to see more people who treat bartending as a career, not something to do between acting gigs. These folks would understand proper cocktail atmosphere, as well as the importance of using fresh ingredients.

"When a bartender pays attention to the tone of the room, all of a sudden the cocktail becomes an experience."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail [email protected]. Unknown:BCD,


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