Senior Resident Fellow, North Gowanus Institute for Cranial Distempers
Brooklyn, USA
DAVID WONDRICH
“A quick and dirty history of the global spirits trade”
Day TBC
TIME TBC
Location: Bisou Bisou
Presented by:
SYNOPSIS
There are no end of books about rum, gin, whiskey and whatnot, but nobody has ever really looked at the spirits trade as a whole; at what all the various spirits have in common (besides C2H5OH, of course), rather than what distinguishes them from each other. In A Quick and Dirty History, David Wondrich will sketch out what a story of the trade might look like, outline what we know, more or less, and what we really don’t know at all, discuss the difficulties and pitfalls of writing such a history and make a case for what we might gain from it; what we might understand better, value more or less, and use to better our place in this industry, and this world.
BIOGRAPHY
David Wondrich, after stints as a boatyard worker, bass player, process server and a dozen other things, took the PhD he got 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.