spirits writing is the art of writing about spirits—the potable sort, not the ghostly sort, though the very fact that the two share a name points to a similarity: both are vaporous substances that provoke a powerful mix of awe, intrigue, admiration, and fear, inspiring stories, legends, and endless study. But where writing on ghosts tends to excel in the fantastical realm, writing on potable spirits provides a window into our everyday existence. Over time, spirits writing has tracked our growth as civilized (and not-so-civilized) beings, our choices and attitudes shaped by geography, technology, and social structures.
Distillation Manuals
Manual writing may seem a far cry from what we term “spirits writing” today, but early writings provide a window into the power that distillation offered mankind. Distillation was considered alchemy, a wondrous, powerful magic that could free souls, and might it was hoped, lead to immortality. “We call it aqua vitae,” Arnald of Villanova wrote in the thirteenth century, “and this name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.” John of Rupescissa, author of
A new phase of spirits writing came in the 1500s, with the rise of the printing press: the ease of printing, and simultaneous rise in literacy rates, opened the door to the how-to manual, a genre especially suited to distillation. Spirits writing took on a more practical tone as it moved from magic toward medicine. One of the earliest known texts of this sort, Liber de arte distillandi by the German surgeon Hieronymus Brunschwig, was terrifically popular, going through sixteen editions between 1500 and 1568. While the term of the day, “medicinal waters,” suggests that spirits were seen as a little less otherworldly, Brunschwig’s recipes remained near magical in their purported powers, curing maladies ranging from malaria to marital issues.
Still, the arcane nature and danger of distillation kept the process largely to doctors and monks. It would take another two hundred years to fully put control right into the hands of the reader, as Ambrose Cooper did in The Complete Distiller (1757). By that time, distillates were already moving from the sickbed to the dining table. “Liquors are among the not-lesser amenities of life, and of dining,” François Massialot had written nearly fifty years earlier in his Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits; “there are refreshments for spring and summer, and others to strengthen and give warmth in winter.” The new books freed the process of their manufacture from the alchemical obfuscation with which it had been veiled. Yet the accessibility that characterized the distillers’ manuals published from the late 1600s to the early 1800s would eventually fall victim to the increasing professionalization of the practical arts that followed the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, in 1708 Massialot himself had already warned that to treat of distilled spirits required “particular knowledge of which not everyone is capable,” which required an arcane specialized vocabulary. By the late nineteenth century, distillers’ manuals had become technical documents, essentially incomprehensible to the layperson. See distillation, history.
Writing for the Consumer
Meanwhile, as people on both sides of the Atlantic became more affluent and alcohol became more widely available, writers began analyzing and explaining the available spirits with an eye to demystifying them for the consumer. The Almanach des gourmands, published annually between 1803 and 1812 by the pioneering Parisian culinary writer Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837), contained among its numerous and varied articles on matters of the table items dissecting things such as curaçao, vermouth, and punch for the consumer.
It would, however, be an Irish excise officer who published the first book to survey the vast and generally unexplored world of spirits. Essay on the Inventions and Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations in the Use of Wine and Other Liquors, published in 1824 by Samuel Morewood (1772–1851), may have also covered fermented beverages, but it placed a special emphasis on distilled drinks, and indeed included the first comprehensive history of the distillation of alcohol. Global in its scope, the book has some sections that have not been entirely superseded today. Such survey books would go on to be a staple of the genre, with examples such as the English writers James Mew and John Ashton’s 1892 Drinks of the World and the 1900 La distillerie dans le monde entier (issued in conjunction with the Paris Universal Exposition that year) providing prominent early examples. Some surveys were more specialized: in the 1880s, Alfred Barnard, a London Journalist, toured the whisky distilleries of Great Britain and recorded his impressions in a fascinating look at Victorian distilling. See Barnard, Alfred.
The nineteenth century also saw the birth of another important genre of drink books, the bartender’s guide. See mixography. By the end of the century, the more sophisticated examples of the genre, such as William Schmidt’s The Flowing Bowl (1892), contained sections on history, poetry, and measured words on the place of alcohol in a balanced diet—all efforts to show alcohol in a sophisticated light during a time it was increasingly coming under attack. See Schmidt, William.
The Praises of Rum
The temperance movement and Prohibition may have been the best things that ever happened to drinks writing. The fight for the right to drink only encouraged more people to write about alcohol, in any forum possible, and with emotion. Newspapers were launched to rail against alcohol, like The Lily in 1849, in which founder Amelia Bloomer raged against “the great evil of intemperance … the cause of so much misery and taxation.” Such sermonizing only encouraged drink writers to sing alcohol’s praises more artfully, and many took to periodicals to voice their support. “The Praises of Rum,” from an 1829 issue of The Ariel, a literary gazette out of Philadelphia, begins, “This subject has been treated by an able pen in verse, but so much has lately been said against rum, and the temperance societies are pulling the spigots out of all the barrels which contain this nourishing drink, that we have concluded to take up the pen in its favor, confident of conquering all its opponents… . No sooner does this cordial thrill though the blood, than poverty loses its horrors… . Rum is a truly republican liquor, for, like death, it is a universal leveler. It brings the judge and the charcoal merchant together in the same cellar.”
Although spirits writing in America went into remission during Prohibition, it didn’t disappear in the rest of the world. Indeed, the 1920s saw a new genre introduced, the “what to drink” book. The English literary critic George Saintsbury’s 1920 Notes on a Cellar Book devoted a key three chapters to spirits, running through the categories and describing favorite bottles in each. Ten years later Whisky, by “Aeneas MacDonald” (the Scottish journalist George Malcolm Thomson), provided the drinker with a concise education in that seductive spirit, just as Robert Delamain’s 1935 Histoire du cognac did for that (equally seductive) one. See MacDonald, Aeneas; and Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman.
In the United States, the disaster that was Prohibition paradoxically opened the door to writing about drinking in general in newspapers and magazines and upscale literature alike, with authors capitalizing on the danger, intrigue, and glamour of the Jazz Age speakeasy. While F. Scott Fitzgerald was chronicling the lifestyle of bootleggers and the people who loved them in The Great Gatsby, Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, introduced a nightlife column dedicated in order to attract readers: When Nights Are Bold, launched on April 25, 1925, would become Tables for Two a few months later, a column still in existence today, if less boozy. Over at the New York Press, the New York American, and later the Evening Post, Maury H. B. Paul gained fame as Cholly Knickerbocker, “America’s most famous and highly paid ($50,000 a year) Society columnist,” according to Life.
Despite the perceived sophistication of those who drank throughout Prohibition, the truth is that high-quality spirits were hard to come by. After Repeal, however, writers raced to re-educate readers, among them Alma Whitaker, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who authored Bacchus Behave! The Lost Art of Polite Drinking in 1933. “Having been involved for so long with synthetic gin, flapper whiskey, and a varied assortment of friendship-testing home brews, our palates and our manners can scarcely be expected to cope successfully with the niceties of the superior nectars that await our fancy,” she opined. “If we are as fussy and fastidious about the quality, quantity and service of our liquor and about the conduct of our guests as we are about the food, the table service and the accouterments of our parties, all will be well.”
Knowing your drinks became a marker of worldliness, and popular titles reflected this, whether it was in references penned by famous European barmen or in the pages of Esquire magazine, whose iconic Potables column ran from 1933 through World War II. The New York Sun had a daily column on drinks run by the estimable G. Selmer Fougner, who fielded readers’ queries on the bottles they had or wished to have. See Fougner, G. Selmer.
By the end of the 1940s, the idea that a man of the world should know his scotch from his rye and his vodka from his white rum was a settled principle of magazine editing, particularly since bon vivants make ripe targets for advertising. After Playboy hired a jet-setting chef named Thomas Mario in 1954 to pen a regular column on wines, spirits, and mixed drinks, publisher Hugh Hefner explained that it provided an opportunity “to include lush, elegant, romantic illustrations … depicting the urban male wining and dining alone with a beautiful girl.” Esquire, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and a host of other men’s magazines all devoted pages to drink as well, mostly targeting the upwardly mobile, debonair modern man. But women were targeted as well, although more for cocktails—a part of entertaining—than for spirits, but spirits were not entirely ignored in such general-audience magazines as
Yet the 1960s made good-life accessories such as Scotch on the Rocks in the paneled basement or the cart of fine French brandies and eaux-de-vie that the maître d’ wheels around after dinner seem stuffy and unfashionable, and even the best spirits writers, such as John Doxat and Cyril Ray in Britain, Henry Crowgey in the United States, and Illa Andreae in Germany (1902–1992; her 1973 Alle schnäpse dieser welt, billed as “the international book of liquid pleasures,” is an essential guide to the wide and complex field of central European spirits), were to some degree voices crying in the wilderness. See Crowgey, Henry Gundry; and Ray, Cyril. Spirits writers were Ella Fitzgeralds in a Janis Joplin world.
The Internet Age
Drinks began earning writers’ serious attention once again in the 1990s, spurred to a large extent by the sudden rise to popularity of single-malt scotch whiskies in the previous decade and the return to a sense of craft in mixing drinks, spearheaded by Dale DeGroff at New York’s newly reopened Rainbow Room in 1987. The whiskies came in a vast profusion and required a certain expertise to navigate, while DeGroff’s drinks were a wake-up call for a generation of drinkers used to canned juices and sour mix, and they inspired a look back at vintage cocktail books and other vintage spirits. These developments exposed the lack of information available on what was already in the market, which writers stepped in to fill.
So did new voices. F. Paul Pacult, who’d been covering California wines in the 1980s, made an important move with his new quarterly Spirit Journal. Rather than accept advertising or fees for reviewing products, Pacult’s subscription-only newsletter inspired a generation of drinkers to look beyond the ads and labels and actually taste what was in the bottle. Other writers began to take a single-subject approach, drilling down on the history and mechanics of particular spirit to celebrate its complexities and place in time and space. Now, no subject was too esoteric: when Barnaby Conrad III published Absinthe: History in a Bottle, in 1988, the spirit was outlawed in the United States, and there was but one domestic stand-in, New Orleans’s Herbsaint. That would change. Other authorities such as Michael Jackson (whisky), Ed Hamilton (rum), and Dave Broom (gin) penned volumes that quickly became classic references. The Malt Advocate (later the Whisky Advocate) in the United States and Whisky magazine in Britain provided specialist forums for those spirits. See Hansell, John; and Pacult, F. Paul.
The lifestyle magazines began to revamp their drinks columns, both in print and, eventually, online, and new topics—agave spirits, gin, American whiskies—edged into the spotlight. The internet speeded everything up, providing a way for drinks enthusiasts to share their knowledge, whether by posting their musings or by providing gathering places for the cognoscenti to exchange information and tips. Early sites such as Ted Haigh’s drcocktail.com and cocktaildb.com and Robert Hess’s Drinkboy.com, launched in 1998, were essential for drawing together people dedicated to the craft of the cocktail. Much of the discussion on these sites centered on the spirits necessary for mixing the classic cocktails being bandied about. And, thanks to the ease of searching databases around the world and back in time via digitized texts, spirits archaeologists not only could now work faster and more thoroughly than ever previously imagined but also now had the ability to check what brands are saying now against what they used to say fifty or a hundred years ago.
There are downsides to the plethora of spirits writing the internet introduced. As spirits writers with real research chops such as Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller and François Monti have found, early texts weren’t always accurate or honest, and understanding them requires a thorough knowledge of the language, materials, and techniques used at the time; yesteryear’s gin is not today’s Tanqueray. See Miller, Anistatia, and Brown, Jared.
Nonetheless, the 2010s proved to be a golden age of spirits writing, as a plethora of new, skilled writers addressed topics that had previously only received the most basic treatment. Chantal Martineau and Emma Jantzen wrote in depth about agave spirits, as did Heather Greene, Fred Minnick, and Davin De Kergommeaux about whisky, Derek Sandhaus about baijiu, and Kara Newman about, well, everything. Unfortunately, for every solidly researched, interesting, stylishly written piece on a spirit, there remain at least a dozen others with titles such as “Four New Rums to Pour over Your Pancakes” or other such clickbait. But in the end, there’s plenty of good reading, from people who have a respect for drinks and the people who drink them and an interest in the place they hold in the world.
Andreae, Illa. Alle schnäpse dieser welt. Zurich: Transitbooks AG, 1973.Forbes, R. J. Short History of the Art of Distillation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1948.
Massialot, François. Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs, et les fruits. Paris: 1708.
Nouraisson, Didier. Le buveur du XIXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 1990.
Pokhlebkin, Vilyam V. A History of Vodka. Translated by Renfrey Clarke. London: Verso, 1992.
By: Tara Q. Thomas and David Wondrich