True Fiction: Making Cocktail History Comicable

Cocktails are a particularly challenging thing to write history about: the people who cared about when things happened and who made them happen didn't much care about writing that down, and the history that did make it into print, there was no real way of checking what was accurate and what was horseshit. On top of that, that history was often brand-driven and covered only one or another part of the story, or written by people more interested in telling a colorful story that in coming at some version of the truth. That means that to put together the "Comic Book History of the Cocktail," required author David Wondrich going back to original sources and trying to stitch them together into a story that is concise, colorful and focused enough to be entertaining, without betraying the people who actually invented, popularized and served the drinks. This anecdotal talk will run through the challenges and highlit the rewards to be found in digging into this odd branch of history.

Ticket includes seminar, meet and greet, and a cocktail. 21+ only. Books will be available for purchase.

David Wondrich, a former boatyard worker, bass player, process server and a dozen other things, took his PhD in Comparative Literature (NYU, 1997) and applied it to the unexplored mass of old bartender's guides, yellowed newspaper clippings, drink-stained menus, throwaway brochures and other such ephemera where the true, and often surprising history of the cocktail and those who mixed and drank it is entombed. The results of his research can be found in his seven highly influential books on the topic, including the James Beard Award-winning Imbibe! (2007; revised edition 2015), Punch (2010); The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (2021; awarded the Dartmouth Medal for best reference book of the year by the American Library Association); and his latest, The Comic Book History of the Cocktail (2025), as well as in the countless articles he wrote for Esquire, where he was a Contributing Editor from 2000 to 2016, the Daily Beast, Imbibe and several dozen other fine publications. He lives in Brooklyn and Trieste, Italy.