Tales of the Cocktail is an annual spirited conference in New Orleans, a city that has historically celebrated intoxication and nightlife. Bartenders, bar owners, chefs, distillers, distributors, marketers, spirits writers, and garden-variety hedonists pour in each July for five days of forums and festivities.
Ann Rogers Tuennerman founded Tales, as it is popularly known, on September 19, 2002. Born in 1964, she grew up in New Orleans and pursued a career in public relations, applying that experience to promote the Crescent City. The inaugural event was a walking tour of French Quarter bars and restaurants conducted by Joe Gendusa, a licensed tour guide, and partly inspired by photojournalist Kerri McCaffety’s book Obituary Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans. The afternoon integrated lore about the Napoleon House, Tujague’s, Arnaud’s, the Carousel Bar, and two hometown drinks that had fallen from grace, the Sazerac and the Ramos Gin Fizz. See Sazerac cocktail and Ramos Gin Fizz.
For the first anniversary of the initial Tales, Tuennerman lured in cocktail cognoscenti, expanded the bacchanal to two days, and secured $25,000 in sponsorship from Southern Comfort. Two hundred revelers hobnobbed with cocktail book authors and explored New Orleans’s dining, literary, and drinks culture. Among the speakers were Dale DeGroff, Gary Regan, Barnaby Conrad III, Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown, and vintage barware collector Stephen Visakay. The events were free save for set-menu dinners paired with drinks at historic establishments for $75. See DeGroff, Dale; Regan, Gary; and Miller, Anistatia, and Brown, Jared.
In 2004, Tales was moved up to mid-August, the city’s slowest tourism time, to capitalize on cheaper hotel rates. Educational seminars and cocktail clinics were added, and the number of attendees increased to three hundred. Also noted was a climb in humidity, blood alcohol levels, and aspirin sales.
In 2008, the New Orleans backdrop provided the inspiration for another Tales ritual, the Cocktail Funeral. Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown documented in their 2012 book, Tales of the Cocktail from A to Z, that jazz funeral processions were held for the scorned Appletini (2008), Redheaded Slut (2009), Sex on the Beach (2010), and Long Island Iced Tea (2011), “buried with hundreds of reveling mourners in gleeful attendance.” See Sex on the Beach and Long Island Iced Tea.
Also in 2008, the Cocktail Apprentice Program began, giving ambitious bartenders a chance to learn alongside cocktail luminaries. Don Lee, cofounder of Cocktail Kingdom, a comprehensive manufacturer and distributor of bar materials, has overseen the program since its inception. He reported that six hundred applications from as far away as Estonia come in every year for just sixty slots. The international, mixed-gender team works twelve-hour days, in 2015 squeezing 5,510 lemons and 24,200 limes and preparing fifty-three sub-recipes, such as lemon-thyme syrup, for a total of 199,550 drink servings.
Industry professionals have come to rely on the event for networking, learning new tricks, tasting new products, hearing accepted cocktail history debunked, and bumping into friends, colleagues, and fans from curb to curb. Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street is the official headquarters. After hours, night owls traditionally migrate around the corner to the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street and to the Alibi on Iberville Street. See Old Absinthe House.
At the thirteenth annual Tales in 2015 there were sixteen thousand registrants able to choose from 349 events, including eighty seminars, seventy-five dining and drinking extravaganzas, and the Spirited Awards ceremony, the Oscars of the cocktail world. Ticket prices generally ranged from $49 to $250. Revenue of $15.6 million was generated for the city. Since 2003, participants have traveled to New Orleans from thirty-five countries and all continents except Antarctica.
Founder Ann R. Tuennerman, who is white, tendered her resignation in 2017 following the controversy that exploded after she posted a Facebook Live video of herself wearing blackface for the Zulu Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. While this is traditional for white guests of Zulu, the main African American Mardi Gras Krewe, it served to highlight the lack of diversity that had long been a point of contention among Tales of the Cocktail attendees and led to the airing of other longstanding grievances. Tuennerman and her husband, Paul, sold Tales for an undisclosed sum to prominent local business people, the Solomon family and Neal Bodenheimer, who kept Tales from disintegrating. The organization was converted into a nonprofit foundation in 2018, declaring a renewed commitment to education and trust within the global spirits community.
English, Camper. “8 Lessons from the World’s Largest Booze Convention,” Details, July 23, 2014. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e0e276e4b0f775e0590d41/t/559a22b6e4b0edd30ab1b9b4/1436164790937/USA+-+Details+-+Plantation+-+July+2014.jpg (accessed April 28, 2021).
Gendusa, Joe. History with a Twist: Lemon or Lime. New Orleans: 2008.
Knapp, Gwendolyn. “What I Learned Working at Tales of the Cocktail,” Eater, July 2, 2015. http://www.eater.com/2015/7/2/8884877/behind-the-scenes-tales-of-the-cocktail (accessed April 6, 2021).
Simonson, Robert. “Tales of the Cocktail, a Troubled Event, May Have a Savior.” New York Times, December 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/dining/drinks/tales-of-the-cocktail-new-orleans.html (accessed April 6, 2021).
Vora, Shivani. “Even Hurricane Katrina Couldn’t Shake New Orleans’ Cocktail Queen,” Fortune, August 24, 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/08/24/even-hurricane-katrina-couldnt-shake-new-orleans-cocktail-queen/ (accessed April 6, 2021).
By: Julie Besonen