Few people in the cocktail world have worked as hard to illuminate drinking history as cocktail historian Dave Wondrich. With Punch and Imbibe!, and several other books under his belt, the writer stays busy. But even with all these commitments, the James Beard recipient and PhD took the time to talk about G.I. Joe cocktail sets, his drinking history, and cocktails any self-respecting drinker should know.
Clair McClafferty Paste: What is your first cocktail-related memory?
David Wondrich: (laughing) Let’s see. I think I was about eight and my father was Italian and we used to spend summers over there. I got a GI Joe scale cocktail kit at a street fair and we set up, my little brother and I, who was about six, I might’ve been nine, something like that, but anyway … We set up a bar with a very nice Boston shaker as I recall, and little cocktail glasses, etc., just like we’d seen on TV. And that (laughing) that’s about as early as it goes. And we had our GI Joes making cocktails.
Paste: That’s amazing.
DW: That’s back when GI Joes were like a foot tall so they were pretty big. It was a long time ago.
Paste: Why did you first start researching cocktails?
DW: I had a vague sort of interest just from reading Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse and all the kind of stuff I used to read back in the days before the internet.
I spent my whole adult life haunting used book stores, so if I came across an interesting looking book about cocktails I would get it, but I never really went out of my way for it. I was more of a beer person for a long time. I liked cocktails when I was a musician in my early 20s because I was hanging out in nightclubs and that was the best way to get cheap alcohol.
By the time I was in my 30s, I was drinking more beer and being a little more sedate about it. That was at the beginning of excellent microbrews everywhere. I was into that, but then I got a call from a friend to see if I could do a research project on cocktails for Esquire.com. It was new then, and it turned out to be way more fun than anything else I was doing, so I went with it.
Paste: How did this research project turn into writing books?
DW: Esquire had an old drinks book they wanted to get put online and they had somebody transcribe it and they needed me to edit it. I started going through it, and being a good Ph.D. in comparative literature, I started organizing the whole thing and breaking the drinks down into genres which is what I was trained to do and all that kind of thing. I noticed that there were these little paragraph long essays for some of the drinks. I put those up at the heads of the categories because I thought those essays were fun, and Esquire liked that.
Esquire really liked [the essays I wrote to fill in the blanks] and said, “Can you do one of these every week for our website?” And I said, “Sure. What the hell.” It was money then and I was a junior English professor and anything involving money was good.
After I had a whole number of them I was able to schedule a meeting with David Granger, Esquire’s then and current editor-in-chief, and suggest that we should do a book, which he happily went along with. That was how I started writing drink books.