David Wondrich

Spirits & Industry

Bitter Is Better: The Amaro Awakening Reshaping American Bar Culture

For most of the twentieth century, amaro occupied a narrow, almost apologetic corner of the American back bar — a dusty bottle offered hesitantly after dinner, largely misunderstood and rarely celebrated. That era has conclusively ended. A new generation of bartenders and drinkers has discovered what Italian grandmothers and Alpine herbalists have always known: bitterness is not a flaw to be corrected, but a dimension worth pursuing.

Oct 1, 2026

Cocktail History

Past Its Prime: Why the Best Bars in America Have Finally Stopped Pretending It's 1922

For the better part of two decades, the speakeasy aesthetic dominated American cocktail culture with the persistence of a bad habit — dim lighting, suspenders, and an unspoken suggestion that the Volstead Act had never quite been repealed. Something has shifted, and the bars leading the conversation today are building their identities on firmer, more original ground.

Sep 30, 2026

Cocktail History

One Glass, One City: The Sazerac and the Soul of American Drinking

No cocktail in the American canon carries more historical weight than the Sazerac. Born in antebellum New Orleans and forged through war, plague, and Prohibition, it is less a recipe than a document — a record of how a city, and a nation, chose to drink. Understanding the Sazerac means understanding how spirits became inseparable from American identity.

Sep 30, 2026

Spirits & Industry

The Trouble with Tasting Notes: Why the Language of Spirits Has Drifted From the Glass

Professional spirits evaluation has developed an elaborate vocabulary that often tells us more about the evaluator's training than about what is actually in the bottle. The psychology of flavor perception, the influence of branding, and the social pressure to defer to expertise have conspired to push drinkers further from their own sensory experience. It may be time to reclaim the glass.

Sep 30, 2026

Cocktail History

Behind the Bar, Before the Myth: The Women Who Poured the Golden Age of American Drinking

Long before the cocktail renaissance elevated the bartender to a figure of cultural authority, women were shaking, stirring, and inventing behind bars across America — and the historical record, once you know where to look, is surprisingly rich. Their erasure from the popular narrative was no accident. This is an attempt to set the record straight.

Sep 30, 2026

Spirits & Industry

Rehabilitating the Neglected Bottle: A Case for Taking Vermouth Seriously Again

Vermouth has spent the better part of half a century being treated as an afterthought in the American bar — measured in drops, refrigerated only as an afterthought, and purchased from the bottom shelf without a second thought. This is a correctable problem, and correcting it would materially improve the quality of the American cocktail.

Sep 30, 2026

Spirits & Industry

Bourbon Without Borders: The Global Appetite for Kentucky Whiskey and What It Costs the Barrel

Bourbon was once the most American of spirits — regional, idiosyncratic, and largely indifferent to foreign opinion. Today it commands auction prices in Tokyo, inspires Japanese distilleries to attempt their own interpretations, and anchors a global premium spirits market that shows no sign of cooling. Whether this transformation represents a triumph for American craft or a quiet dilution of something irreplaceable is a question worth examining with some care.

Sep 30, 2026

Cocktail History

Lost in the Dry Years: The Pre-Prohibition Cocktails America Forgot to Remember

Before the Volstead Act silenced the American bar in 1920, a generation of skilled bartenders had spent decades refining drinks of genuine elegance and complexity. Thirteen years of enforced abstinence did more than shutter saloons — it severed a living tradition, consigning dozens of sophisticated recipes to the margins of old manuals and fading memory. The craft cocktail revival has rescued some of these classics, but the most interesting ones remain stubbornly overlooked.

Sep 30, 2026