The first draft of the famous story was called ‘A Martini as Big as the Ritz’. That’s not true, but F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly at work in the First Cocktail Age. The Algonquin circle also floated into literary history on a choppy ocean of toxically high-ABV mixed drinks. The quotes and jokes are legend: Robert Benchley says to Ginger Rogers in a 1942 Billy Wilder film ‘Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?’ (The line is also attributed to Mae West.) And ours is the Second Cocktail Age. While we wait for its literary heroes, three appreciative books are here to be enjoyed in immoderation.
My generation prefers wine. Sometimes I feel we actually discovered Chardonnay, but a generation younger has rediscovered the cocktail. There are several significant subtleties here. Running a bar has become as cool as being in a band once was: when someone writes the history of the South London Renaissance, the opening of Frank’s Cafe and Campari Bar in a Peckham multi-storey car park in 2009 will be the first chapter. And there has been a huge and happy revival in craft gin, partly as an abreaction to faceless multinational drinks conglomerates, partly as a response to the gastronomic imperative of locality.
But the indulgent, soothing and glamorous cocktail is perhaps a corrective to dismaying contemporary anxieties about a fretful and fraying world. As Richard Godwin says in The Spirits, his good-natured manifesto about domestic mixology: ‘Of all the skills you might acquire in life, learning how to make strong effective cocktails is the least likely to be a waste of your time.’ And, helpfully, you can equip a basic bar with six bottles for about £80 and all the rest is shaking and stirring and sipping.
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