Enjoy a Good Cocktail? Thank David Wondrich

The recent tour for David Wondrich’s newest book, The Comic Book History of the Cocktail, included at least one stop you wouldn’t call usual for a cocktail historian: Comic Con at the Javits Center in New York City. There, he and illustrator Dean Kotz signed books for cosplaying buyers dressed as Boba Fett and Sailor Moon. “That was insane,” Wondrich says. “But that was just people buying books to buy books. These weren’t people who knew anything about cocktails.” Wondrich could conceivably qualify as a comic-book superhero. Call him Captain Cocktail.

For no one in today’s amnesiac society has arguably done more to salvage and defend the good name of the cocktail. Comic Book, published last fall, is his latest work of mixological scholarship. It is part of a Terrence Malick–like late-career burst of creativity that began in 2021 with the monumental The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, the work of nearly a decade, co-authored with Noah Rothbaum. “It’s done what I hoped it would do and become a standard reference,” he says of the latter, a whopper of nearly 900 pages. “But as such, it kind of fades into the infrastructure. People quote it without citing it.”

His influence in cocktail circles is so complete at this point that it almost resembles wallpaper.

The Oxford Companion could stand as a sort of metaphor for Wondrich’s career. His influence in cocktail circles is so complete at this point that it almost resembles wallpaper. It’s all over, but you can’t see it for its everywhereness.

Are rye whiskey drinks served at your favored cocktail bar? You can thank Wondrich, who during the aughts beat the rye drum nonstop, calling for the spirit’s return to liquor stores and back bars. Is there a New York Sour on the menu? Wondrich helped resurrect and popularize that once-forgotten cocktail. Is there an El Presidente? The Cuban classic is now correctly made with blanc vermouth because of his research. Does the bar serve a daily punch? You have the person that friends call “the historical oracle” to thank. His book Punch reaffirmed the shared beverage’s role as a load-bearing pillar in cocktail history.

“For me, the rediscovery of oleo saccharum was huge,” says Doug Frost, a co-founder with Wondrich of the Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR), an educational forum that has taught hundreds of bartenders in the ways of the cocktail. “It certainly changed my notions of punch forever.”

Some bars partly owe their very personalities to Wondrich. Buck & Breck, a leading cocktail bar in Berlin, is named after a lost 19th-century drink he uncovered. The Jerry Thomas Speakeasy in Rome is named for the “Father of Mixology” he restored to relevancy in Imbibe!, his seminal 2007 book of cocktail archeology. Clover Club in Brooklyn got from him the formula of its signature cocktail.

“I wanted to name my bar after the drink and was working on making the best Clover Club I could,” says Julie Reiner, co-owner of the bar. “I remember him running in to tell me he had found the oldest printed recipe for the drink, which included dry vermouth. And I started including dry vermouth in the variations I was testing and was blown away by how much more complex it made the cocktail.”

Some of the tools behind many bars may come from Cocktail Kingdom, a bar supply company that sells his line of historically oriented barware. And he may have consulted on the creation of some of the bottles on the back bar.

From a writer’s point of view, meanwhile, Wondrich invented a job: cocktail journalist.

From a writer’s point of view, meanwhile, Wondrich invented a job: cocktail journalist. Most everyone in the pages of this magazine followed in the footsteps he laid down during his many years as the resident booze reporter at Esquire. “It was a job, but it was a different job,” he says. “They were kind of humor writers. It was not like it is now. There weren’t dedicated cocktail journalists. You had to write a bit about everything. That’s where I came in.”

David Wondrich came in as an academic. Having given up dreams of rock stardom (he played bass), he was an unhappy English professor at St. John’s University on Staten Island. Thus, when Esquire invited him to contribute, he applied both a punk-rock sensibility and academic rigor to the study of cocktails.

“He thoroughly and meticulously prepares for our cocktail seminars, just like the college professor he once was,” says tiki scholar Jeff Berry, who, in partnership with Wondrich, has presented some of the most revelatory and popular seminars in the history of Tales of the Cocktail. “Any time I’m at a loss, he’ll invariably jump in with some obscure but highly relevant factoid.”

Wondrich’s nonstop digging into barroom history hasn’t always endeared him to his colleagues. Bartenders, after all, like telling tales, even if those tales are apocryphal. “It was a little frustrating at times,” says Reiner, “because he debunked so many of the fun stories we had all been telling in seminars about the origins of various cocktails.”

Much of Wondrich’s reputation rests on the twin volumes of Imbibe! (2007) and Punch (2010), both products of the same period of feverish activity. (The text of Punch—which is now tragically out of print—was actually culled from the overstuffed Imbibe! manuscript.) Any other writer might have rested on those laurels, and, for a while, it seemed that Wondrich was doing just that. Then came The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails in 2021; and the equally ambitious if completely different The Comic Book History of the Cocktail last autumn. Wondrich is currently working on yet another new book, this one on the history of the spirits trade.

In fact, books will be his focus going forward. “I’m trying to do less journalism,” he says. “I wrote god knows how many columns over so many years.”

That’s good news to Andrew Bohrer, the bartender and artist who interviewed Wondrich during the Seattle stop of his Comic Book tour. “I don’t like most cocktail content these days,” Bohrer says. “It either has no point of view or is only point of view. Either way, there is little substance. I very much want to be a person who reads something 15 years ago and wants to bookmark it for future research. But I’m not. Dave is, though.”

… [David’s] interests remain decidedly backward-looking, embodied by the classic cocktail and the old-school bar.

Neither will you find Wondrich haunting the world’s buzziest cocktail boites. Even though almost every new cocktail bar that opens today is either directly or indirectly influenced by his work, his interests remain decidedly backward-looking, embodied by the classic cocktail and the old-school bar. “I go out to bars,” he says, pointedly leaving out the qualifier “cocktail.” There, he’ll order something simple like a Martini or Daiquiri. “I don’t go deliberately to places to taste their original cocktails. I’m burned out a little about that.

“The thing that people making all the innovative drinks are up against is, once you’re playing that game, it’s a vicious circle, and you can’t get out of it,” he continues. “You have to keep innovating. And you’re innovating farther and farther out. And at a certain point, taste yields to innovation.”

More his speed is the simple yet elegant aperitivo culture of Italy, where he now spends a considerable part of every year. His father was born in Trieste, the northern Italian city where Wondrich and his wife, Karen Rush, recently bought an apartment.

In New York, meanwhile, if he wants an original cocktail, he can make one himself. He invents one many nights in the kitchen of his old townhouse in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. Most are made once and then forgotten. The good ones, he writes down.

Wondrich knows his dedication to slow book work makes him a bit of an anachronism in today’s moment-by-moment digital world. (He made his first-ever Instagram post only in April 2025.) The news today is full of stories about how people don’t read anymore. That sad state of affairs extends to cocktail books as well. “I don’t think that the younger generation is as aware of David and his contributions as those who came before,” says Reiner, “particularly before the pandemic.”

“Fifteen years ago, you could persuade people who didn’t know they had an interest in cocktails to buy a serious cocktail book,” says Wondrich. “The initial wave of cocktail revolution books were very good and that lasted for a few years.” Today’s crop of pop-culture tie-in cocktail books are, in his opinion, “flooding the receptors, so people aren’t really looking much beyond them. They’re not going deeper.”

But Wondrich has not given up on reaching a larger audience. The comic version of the cocktail continuum was not the oddball move it seems on the surface, but rather a sly compromise between professor and today’s recalcitrant students of the bar. “I wanted to do it in the first place in part to reach the readers—from what I’ve gathered, thank god, a pretty small minority—who found Imbibe! to be heavy going,” he says.

If he picked up a few Boba Fetts in the process, so much the better. “A lot of comics people geared down and said, ‘Hey, this is pretty good.’”

The post Enjoy a Good Cocktail? Thank David Wondrich appeared first on Imbibe Magazine.