Episode 151: Twenty Years of Imbibing with Wayne Curtis, Ted Haigh, and David Wondrich

As part of our 20th-anniversary celebrations, we’re bringing together the cocktail historians who’ve been regular columnists for Imbibe over the past two decades—Wayne Curtis, Ted Haigh, and David Wondrich—each of whom has helped shape our current cocktail landscape by introducing modern drinkers to once-lost classics like the Boulevardier.

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine. Keep up with us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber, we’d love to have you join us—click here to subscribe. 

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Paul Clarke 

Hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s Editor-in-Chief. 

Our 20th anniversary issue is out right now, and we’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months thinking about many of the changes that have taken place at Imbibe, and in the drinks world, over the past two decades. Over the years, we’ve always aimed to bring our readers and our larger audience into the contemporary world of cocktail bars, and of interesting ingredients and approaches to making drinks. 

But also, from the very beginning, starting with our premiere issue in 2006, we’ve also recognized the significance of history in today’s cocktail world, and how the bartenders and the institutions and the spirits and cocktails from past decades and past centuries continue to influence the way we drink today. Almost every issue of Imbibe over the past 20 years has featured a regular column that, from one direction or another, explores cocktails, cocktail culture, and drinking establishments from the past. 

We’ve had three regular columnists over the years putting these pieces together, starting with Ted Haigh, Dr. Cocktail, who I profiled in our first issue of Imbibe in 2006, and who began contributing later that year with his column, “Rediscovering Vintage Drinks with Dr. Cocktail.” In 2011, David Wondrich moved into the columnist role, and that section was rebranded as Cocktail Archaeology. A few years later, starting in 2014, Wayne Curtis picked up the column, first exploring drinking establishments from the past, in his “Behind the Bar” column, then shifting gears in 2017 to focus on different aspects of drinking culture under the banner of Mixopedia, the title that column retains today. 

So, as part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, I thought it might be interesting to gather Ted Haigh, David Wondrich, and Wayne Curtis together online for a short conversation about their experiences of exploring cocktail history for Imbibe, and the continuing significance of drinks history to today’s drinking culture. 

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Paul Clarke

Gentlemen, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Wayne Curtis

Hey, Paul. 

David Wondrich

Hi Paul.

Paul Clarke

It’s great to have you on, and I’ve been looking forward to putting something like this together for quite some time, because, as you may have figured out by now, right now, 2026 is Imbibe‘s 20th anniversary, and you’ve each played a significant role in helping the magazine develop its audience and its identity over these past two decades. So, first off, tremendous thanks to you guys for everything you’ve done for us. 

David Wondrich

Well, thank you. It’s always been a pleasure to write for the magazine. 

Wayne Curtis

Yeah. Thank you for the platform. Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

And I also wanted to put this together, because each of you have come at the cocktail question from a shared direction in some ways, by exploring the history of cocktails, but you’ve also each gone in your own different directions over the years with the columns you’ve contributed. And I want to tease out some of those similarities and differences and also talk a bit about the role that understanding cocktail history has played in this larger craft cocktail renaissance that we’ve been living through and contributing to. 

So, Ted, I would like to start with you, because you were Imbibe‘s first regular columnist, starting with our third issue in 2006 with your column, “Rediscovering Vintage Drinks with Dr. Cocktail.” And, of course, you were profiled in the magazine’s inaugural issue, and in your columns, which went on for close to five years, you started following a similar approach to the one you’d established in your book, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. At that time, back in 2006, when you first started doing this for Imbibe, how much or how little did the larger cocktail community understand about many of these lesser-known cocktails from the past and what kinds of stories you were hoping to share? 

Ted Haigh

I think at that point that Imbibe came out, I think what I did, essentially, was continue the theme of my book. I wanted to continue finding lost cocktails. I didn’t want to ever tell a story that had ever been told before. 

Paul Clarke

One thing I did want to point out from early on is an early column from the Dr. Cocktail era, because I’m of the opinion that this one really did something that wound up resonating on a larger scale. And that’s the column you wrote for our March-April issue in 2007. And if you recall, that column focused on the cocktail that I had not yet seen on American bar menus at all before that time. And that’s the Boulevardier. Of course, now the Boulevardier is on everyone’s menu, or it’s not even listed on cocktail bar menus, because oftentimes it’s considered such a familiar classic. It’s like a Negroni or a Manhattan at this point, where you don’t even need to spell it out anymore. That’s one that I can recall that I think really spun out there in the rest of the world. 

Ted Haigh

Right. And that, of course, came out of the Harry McElhone book, Barflies and Cocktails. But it was only in like a footnote in that book. It was one in smaller text that he said, oh, and the guys just came around the bar. The guy who edited Boulevardier came in, and he had his favorite bartender, and this was the drink he created. I mean, I also tried, I think at one point, and it was rejected, to put in what was it called, the Tarantula cocktail, where they had like a load of pot and some gasoline. 

David Wondrich

That’s a pretty good one. 

Ted Haigh

It was a great drink, great drink. But yes, exactly. I was, I like to find, I mean, if I had been able to find the, It’s handwritten in some- and I have a few of those handwritten bartenders’ notebooks. None of them contained anything absolutely wonderful, but that’s exactly what I was wanting to do with that one. And I felt the same way about my book itself. The idea that a drink that I loved, that had not been known in the broader world, would again have life to it. And yes, the Boulevardier was … certainly became one of those and I love it and I still order that drink in bars today. 

Paul Clarke

So in 2011, Dave, you came into the columnist’s seat with your column, “Cocktail Archaeology with David Wondrich.” And in some ways, you followed a similar pattern as Ted had established of digging into individual cocktails and some of their backstory. But you took it in your own direction too. You worked in more information about specific bars, bartenders, other things going on within the larger culture. Do you recall how you approached it at the time? Like what kind of framework did you give yourself when you would sit down and start working on one of the columns? 

David Wondrich

Well, by 2011 and after I had worked on my coincidentally titled book Imbibe!, I realized that cocktail history had always been like kind of a realm of mythology. You took old-timers statements and just random stuff from novels and things like that and tried to stitch together a history of a cocktail or something. That kind of stuff that had been put on line. We had an ability to live in a post mythological age to some degree. And I thought it was cool because every one of those cocktail myths about who invented this drink or who invented that drink… Underneath that, somebody else was getting screwed, the person who actually invented the drink. 

You know, the place in the bar where it was actually done, we’re getting, we’re getting, we’re being like pared over with this paste of a bull, you know. And it was saying, okay, let’s see if we can put that aside and see what people said at the actual time when this drink came out and find out what came out, maybe where and stuff like that. And I was very interested in getting to the people behind these things. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. And you also corrected the record on some points as we got into this, because again, this is 2011. We had kind of what we thought we knew about classic cocktails and vintage cocktails at the time. But as you did your research, you were uncovering things that maybe we didn’t understand or we didn’t know the true story about something. And here I’m thinking specifically of the El Presidente, because this is something you wrote about in one of your columns. 

David Wondrich

Yeah, I think that was maybe my second column. Yeah, for that I had help from international friends, who was, my friend Fernando Castellon had been to the National Library in Havana and dug up this extremely rare cocktail book that had the original, the first recipe of the Presidente. And then I, armed with that, I saw that some of the early Cuban recipes agreed with it. And what they agreed with was it wasn’t made with dry vermouth or sweet vermouth. It was made with blanc vermouth, Chambery vermouth. And that drink had always broken my brain, because it was an Esquire drink. It had been written up early on in Esquire, and I’d always tried to make it, and I could not get it to taste good. It was either too sweet, or you couldn’t taste the rum, or it was kind of unharmoniously dry, and that was just a nightmare. And then I finally made it with Chambery vermouth, semi-sweet white vermouth. And suddenly it just went snap right into place. And it was like, oh, this is a very good drink. Who knew? So that was cool. Stuff like that. 

Paul Clarke

Yeah. And I do recall, you know, first mixing in El Presidente, which I think I learned about the recipe from your book, from Esquire Drinks, in which book you’re using dry vermouth. And I remember thinking at the time, maybe I did it wrong. Maybe I just don’t understand this. Maybe I’m not ready for it yet. And then when you came out with your column with blanc vermouth, it was all of a sudden like, you know, pulling the curtain aside, going, right, this makes sense. Okay, this makes much more sense in that way.

David Wondrich

I mean, I eventually learned that if a drink was at all popular back in the day, there was usually a reason. And if you make it and it’s just nasty, you’re You kind of got the wrong grip on it, you know? And you might have to reevaluate something because it just couldn’t have gotten popular if it tasted that bad. 

Paul Clarke

But all of this transitioned again in 2014 when Wayne, when you stepped in the role with what at first was called “Behind the Bar, Where Yesterday Drank.” And under your tenure, under your long tenure in the column, it’s gone in several directions at times. But we started off with this look at specific bars in history. You know, away from talking about cocktails and more about the bars and the culture themselves, places like the Kahiki in Columbus, Ohio, or City Tavern in Philadelphia. Why did this direction appeal to you at the time, especially when we’re thinking about kind of where we were in our thinking about drinks history at the time? 

Wayne Curtis

Well, I, a lot of that was the offshoot from the research I’d done on my book on the history of rum, which forced me to research taverns and saloons and cocktail lounges over the last couple hundred years. And I was just intrigued by these places and how they came to be and what role they played in promoting and marketing and popularizing different drinks. And it seemed like it would be a good way to take that column, just start exploring sort of offbeat places. I remember we did one up, uh, it was in, I think, Portland, Oregon, that had the world’s longest bar. And then, so you used that to sort of talk about this, the epicness of some of the drinking establishments at the time. We did, I remember we did one on a bar outside Birmingham, Alabama, in a cave. 

Paul Clarke

Exactly. 

Wayne Curtis

And there was this whole sort of move towards lagoon and grotto and cave bars that were hilarious. And they sort of ran in packs and it was sort of intriguing. It wasn’t just writing about the bars to see what was happening at the time. It was writing about what was going on as the sort of the national psyche, especially as it related to drink at the time. And so that first iteration of the column, looking at bars, they weren’t, they tended not to be the famous bars. They tended to be the slightly more obscure bars. It was a good way of getting at how people drank and where they drank and what they did when they were drinking.

Paul Clarke

Right, right. I think one of my favorites from that initial series was about a bar that didn’t even actually exist in the physical world. And this is one that you did for a holiday issue on Clarence’s bar from It’s a Wonderful Life. And looking at this bar that only existed in the movies, but it existed in two very different ways in the same movie. 

Wayne Curtis

Yeah. No, that’s, and that sort of is a prototype for every bar. I think every bar exists in two different cases. Okay, so it’s a real bar. And that’s the bar people imagine and tell their friends. They tend to be related, but not exactly the same. And that’s, that’s all part of part of the intrigue of drinking culture is that sort of what’s what’s real and what’s fantasy. 

Paul Clarke

And then this column did transition in 2017 into the name it has today, Mixopedia. But it’s still been several things kind of underneath that name. And we went from taking, you know, initially under Ted, and then under Dave, of looking at individual cocktails, and then looking at the people in the bars behind those cocktails into looking at bars, you went in the reverse direction for this, you did a tight focus on things like the history of the maraschino cherry or of the pony glass, which was I pretty really love that one, because it gave us an opportunity to talk about My Little Pony. 

Wayne Curtis

It did. How often can you get my little pony? 

Paul Clarke

As you dug into things like matchbooks and ice cube trays, what kind of interesting diversion was this from talking purely about cocktails and bars? 

Wayne Curtis

Well, it was the context. It was where what was happening around the drinks that were being consumed, what people were thinking of what they were using at the time. I think the one piece that of that era when I was writing about otherwise unnoticed things was the history of the brass footrail, which is, I will remind you, you rejected several times. You said nobody was interested in the brass footrail. But I wore you down over the course of about a year and you let me do it. And that was the one that got picked up by other publications. And now because the brass footrail is just fascinating. It’s an ergonomic miracle. It was created back before there were bar stools and people stood at the bar and someone realized if you cock up one foot a little bit, you’re more comfortable, therefore, you’re more likely to stay for a second drink. It was really a marketing genius marketing device.

So things like that, which you’re you just don’t notice in a bar, you know, or the the pony glass, where that came from, or that why the cocktails spoon as a twist in it, just little things like that. It was, you know, sort of the, I guess, the Nicholson Baker approach to drinking take something small and make it big. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. And looking more broadly for for each of you, you know, there are different aspects of cocktail history and history of drinks and drinking and the culture of drinking that have informed each of your approaches and careers over the years, as you’ve gone through it over the decades, what elements of drink history, do you still find engaging and interesting and motivating to you and Dave? Can I ask you to start? 

David Wondrich

Yeah, there’s a lot of I’ve got a lot of like, my little project. And so one of them, for instance, is the history of African American bartenders, which was utterly unknown 25 years ago, it was it had been hidden and erased so thoroughly. And it was such a big feature in the 19th century. And I started when I was digging into for my book about Jerry Thomas, I started to wonder who was before him. And one of the guys I found was Cato Alexander, who was, African-American bartender very early had evidently held George Washington’s horse once and stuff like that. So he grew up in the in the in trade. And I started to like kind of link these people together. I thought so.

So I’ve got a lot of little projects like that, that are just things that I’m always trying to add stuff to. Some are spirits history, some are cocktail history, but those things I’m always going to be interested in. Because I’ve already got a thick file and if something comes up that I haven’t seen before, I want to see that too. And I want to I want to explore that. So there’s a bunch of stuff and writing for Imbibe let me do a lot of that. There was Joe Redding’s julep I wrote up, which was kind of the early history of the juleps, a great, a great kind of piece of Americana. But also it’s got like gunplay in it and Arkansas toothpicks and irate customers and custom tailoring and all this stuff. It’s this wild antebellum story that just got completely out of control. But and that that’s the intersection of a lot of stuff that I found all fun to write about. 

Paul Clarke

Right. And Wayne, likewise, you’ve kind of gone in different directions over the years. Like we said, you’ve gone for the big approach of looking at bars of history that up close individual things like matchbooks and pony glasses, and then more recently exploring different things and our current project where you’re looking at things from the past 20 years or so from the 21st century. As you look ahead at the way that drinks history influences, what kinds of things have you seen from the past 20 years from the time that you’ve been working in this that you think your successors 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now might be reflecting on and saying these were key moments? 

Wayne Curtis 

I’m not a futurist. I’m not a trained futurist. Where we’re headed. Other than I, you know, there’s a lot of doom and gloom right now that the millennials aren’t drinking, drinks are too expensive, etc, etc. But I tend to ignore all of that. But I think the one thing that I’ve enjoyed doing, and I think the cocktail historians in the future will enjoy doing is the finding drinks that have disappeared. You know, the drinks that we all know, the old fashioned, the Manhattan, the hanky panky, the Boulevardier, which we were just talking about, have managed to survive through some sort of cocktail Darwinism. And we don’t pay attention to the ones that died. 

David Wondrich

Yes. 

Wayne Curtis

Along the way, which is what I’ve enjoyed writing about, like the Atoms for Peace cocktail, which, you know, talks a lot about what was happening during the nuclear proliferation era, or the ping pong cocktail from the 1910s, reflecting the popularity of ping pong, or the Hallelujah cocktail, which Amy Semple McPherson was named after Amy Semple McPherson, a drum beater and anti-alcohol crusader, who apparently snuck a drink. I love these little, these drinks that have fallen by the way, and rediscovering them, I think what was going on at the time, and why didn’t they survive? A lot of them didn’t survive because they, frankly, were quite horrible. But a lot of them maybe didn’t survive because they didn’t have a great story to go with them, or that they just weren’t, they didn’t, they weren’t as sturdy as a three-legged stool. They were more like a five-legged stool that was just a little wobbly, and eventually they toppled over and no longer were consumed.

But I hope future cocktail historians will look back at some of the things that failed today, and what was going on. Maybe the names were just too horrible. Maybe the ingredients are no longer available. But I think those are just as telling as the drinks that survived. We’ve got the modern classics that have been written about to some extent. And I’d be curious to see which of those will continue on in the next 20, 30, 40 years. But I hope that the future historians also look at the ones that we are drinking now that nobody would dare touch these days. Will RTDs be around then? I don’t know. 

Paul Clarke

There was a baffling fondness for the flavor of elderflower in the early 21st century. 

Wayne Curtis

And then we’re wondering, call it the bartender’s ketchup, but what was ketchup? It’s like a bland salsa.

David Wondrich

I think those future drink writers are going to have a hell of a time reproducing acidulated spirulina gin, or whatever Ingredients that everybody seems to be tossing around with gay abandon these days. 

Ted Haigh

Of what Wayne said, it was certainly true of what I did, too. All I cared about were the drinks that had been forgotten, wondering why. And most of them, of course, came from fairly early on. The ‘30s and well back before Prohibition. But I noticed in the Mamie Taylor, that that was a drink while it probably did in fact exist as of the 1890s. It really kept on in Jack Townsend’s books and where he was writing about the top drinks that were still served and the receding ones and the advancing ones. And the Mamie Taylor was in there and I was like, “What?” You know? And I thought about it and I thought, “That sounds disgusting!” And then, of course, I tried it and found it was absolutely brilliant! 

And what I’m getting at here is that I, it encouraged me to look at eras where you wouldn’t normally look. Like, for instance, the ’60s. In the ’60s, what you got a lot of was add this frozen limeade, and this coca-cola, and, and just, just a horrible, horrible decade for, for, for actually creative cocktails. And so looking in that era for something that was actually good was, I thought, was, I thought, a worthwhile thing. And if I had continued my column, I would have gone more that way. 

In fact, one I discovered fairly recently was in the 1972 Trader Vic’s bar guide. It was, it was literally rum, and orange peel, and blonde Dubonnet. So I finally found a bottle and it was better than, as an aperitif, than, and white vermouth. But it was pretty bland. And so I thought, that’s what it is. Because, of course, Dubonnet made white Dubonnet to compete with Lillet. And Lillet made red, red Lillet to compete with Dubonnet. So, who really cared? So I had that. But what I had been doing for this, the Antilles cocktail that I’m talking about. Instead, I used Cocci Americano. The cocktail was excellent. Excellent. And just that simple. And, and that’s the sort of thing I, I love to find. Because who would have thought? And who would have thought that my simple grab of that bottle would end up being better than what they actually called for in it? 

I guess the, I guess the other thing I’d say is, is just as my book took me about 10 years before it was published from when I initially conceptualized it, I’ve been working on a book on Southern cocktails for at least 15. I mentioned it because in terms of lost cocktails or interesting cocktails, it’s the one that made me understand that the naming conventions for cocktails was incredibly similar to that for sheet music. But you had, you had carry me back to old Virginia written by a guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth on an upright piano in New York, you know, stuff like that. And, and so we have Creole cocktails. 

So I didn’t start, I didn’t do the obvious thing about going down to New Orleans and looking at the Ramos Fizz and the da da da da da da da da da, all the same ones, all that thin, thin book. I started looking for naming conventions that were referencing the South. So then I suddenly had 500 pages of stuff, but it’s fascinating just to, to, to look at it from, from that perspective. So being able to, it turns the cocktail, the whole cocktail, the search for forgotten cocktails and interesting, unremembered cocktails on its head, because it’s not looking so much at the import of the name and what was in it as it’s sort of sales point. Like, like, like on, in sheet music. 

Paul Clarke

What I want to ask all of you is, is, you know, going back 20 years to when we were first establishing some of the building blocks of what’s now the cocktail Renaissance and looking at history and, and classics was a way to inform some of the bartenders at the time of the possibilities and gave them a starting point. 20 years later, can bar and cocktail history still inform where cocktail bars are going? And are there still elements from the past that you think we haven’t fully explored yet? 

David Wondrich

I mean, there’s a lot of stuff we haven’t fully explored yet. I’m just working on a second edition of my book on punches. There’s so many punches out there that have been just left by the wayside that have unique pieces of technique, unique flavor profiles, unique visions of how to balance a drink. There’s all kinds of stuff that bartenders are still doing today. That’s part of their everyday work that used to be handled very differently. And I think that’s, as with literary history or any, any history of any art or craft, That’s where history comes in handiest, I think, is, uh, giving you a bank of techniques and flavor profiles in your head. The things that a drink can taste like. And, uh, so you say, oh, yes, if I do a little more of this, then this is going to switch into this different kind of focus than the usual. And it could be delicious. so I think there’s a lot of that kind of, that history is unparalleled. 

Paul Clarke

Wayne, what about you? I mean, you, you’ve kind of tracked how things have changed over the years. What things out of the past, do you think this hasn’t hit yet, but it’s, it’s ripe for somebody to come back to it? 

Wayne Curtis

Well, I think that for, for us, uh, Dave and I in particular, because we did a lot of the research using the new databases that happened to come out just as we were starting to do. Do I, Dave and I both started, I believe with microfilms and basements and libraries that smelled like decaying acetate. Uh, and then suddenly you could do everything online with PDFs and find 30 million pages of newspapers. So it ended up with a lot of small, we ended up with a lot of, uh, dots. 

David Wondrich

And you could do it in your bunny slippers.

Wayne Curtis

Well, uh, precisely. I mean, we ended up with a, we’ve, we found a lot of the, a lot of the dots, a lot of the things that were happening around the country and, and, and, you know, unheralded and forgotten bars. But I think for the future, the next generation of historians can do more connecting of the dots and sort of seeing what regional trends were, what chronological trends were. Uh, and from that, they can sort of maybe come up with some new conclusions and maybe new delicious drinks as well. We’ve done the, the shovel work early foundation and I’m looking forward to see what the next generation does to, to build on that. 

Paul Clarke 

Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time to go over all of this and to go over the past 20 years of your contributions to Imbibe. And I’m looking forward to what we can do and what we can run in the, in the years ahead. Thanks so much for your time and for sharing all of this with us. 

David Wondrich 

Thank you, Paul. Thanks for having me. And, uh, you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll be in touch. 

Wayne Curtis 

Thanks. We’re going to have a drink.

Ted Haigh

Let’s do this more regular.

David Wondrich

Yeah. Hell, yeah.

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Paul Clarke

Ted Haigh’s 2003 book, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails is still essential reading for cocktail fans today. Pick up a copy from your favorite bookseller. David Wondrich’s latest book is The Comic Book History of the Cocktail with illustrator Dean Kotz. Be sure to track that down as well. And Wayne Curtis’s current work can be found in every issue of Imbibe magazine and via his substack newsletter, The Long Bar. 

And that’s it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got tons of recipes and articles for you online at our website, imbibemagazine.com. Keep up with us day to day on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and threads. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then let’s get you on board in celebration of our 20th anniversary. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.