I was riding shotgun for my wife, out on Saturday errands when the email came. I never check email on weekends, but it’s even less common to find myself in a passenger seat with some free iPhone time, so the rare combination of freedom and boredom broke me down.
From a glance, the subject line didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Credit – You’ve been approved.
Ugh. DELE-but wait. There was something about the sender. The name was familiar. It was one of those names you don’t know, but you know. I read the subject again. Media Credentials – You’ve been approved.
Holy shit.
“What?”
Holy shit.
“What? Holy shit what?”
We got in. I can’t believe we got in.
“We got in what?”
Huh? No, I mean… not We me and you. We me and Albert. Holy SHIT.
“Albert and I. You got in what?”
Tales of the Cocktail. We got media passes. HA! The fools gave us media passes!
“What’s Tales of the Cocktail?”
The huge cocktail convention? In New Orleans? Tales of the Cocktail? HOLY SHIT THEY GAVE US FULL MEDIA PASSES.
“Whatever.”
I scrambled to forward the email to Albert. I needed to get this message in front of him asap, if only so I could know at least one other person was as giddy and as giggly and as pleasantly perplexed as I was. I’m not even sure what I wrote in the FWD, but it was something to the effect of, “HOLY SHIT.”
Readers of more serious cocktail blogs are well familiar with Tales of the Cocktail⎯the New Orleans event that attracts thousands of media, bar owners, mixologists, historians, distillers and product-humping brand managers each year, turning the historic French Quarter into a writhing, swirling, sweat-soaked carnival of booze. Even more than usual, I mean.
The heart of the event is the Hotel Monteleone, where the revolving Carousel Bar once gave birth to a drink called the Vieux Carré, a mixture of brandy, whisky, vermouth, Benedictine and bitters that’s as beautifully weird as the city itself. For five days and nights, the Monteleone is like a fancy drunk tank where all the inmates wear nametags and share drinking stories over Sazeracs and milk punches. There are dozens of seminars on everything from absinthe and Irish whisky to barrel aging and bitters. There’s a seminar on swizzle sticks. AND IT’S SOLD OUT.
But that’s just the front of the house. Throughout the Quarter there are spirited dinners hosted by bar and bottle legends like Wild Turkey’s Jimmy Russell and Cocktail God David Wondrich. There are competitions, testing bartenders on speed and creativity. There are guided tours of some of the oldest bars in America. There are tasting rooms staffed by liquor reps wielding trays full of spirits, some not yet on the market, others looking to find a new niche. There are parties, after-parties, after-party after-parties, and top-secret late-night after-after party-parties. All this against the steamy gumbo-tinted backdrop of America’s most American city. And all with me and Albert right in the middle of it. Albert and I.
If you’re not picturing some twisted fisheyed scene out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas⎯a Kimono’ed Albert barricaded in a hotel bathroom with a shotgun and a pit bull, and myself, eyebrows singed-off, feverishly scrubbing blood stains out of a rented clown suit⎯then you haven’t been reading American Drink very long.
The rest of you are already thinking what I was thinking the second that email subject line became clear: Oh, my God. Tales of the Cocktail fucked up.
So yeah. From some time next Tuesday, July 19, through the following Sunday, we’ll be “covering” Tales of the Cocktail from New Orleans. What that means exactly (posts, live tweets, drink reports, pleas for medical assistance) we honestly don’t know yet. But if not informative, it should at least be pretty entertaining, as evidenced by Albert’s one-sentence response to my email that Saturday with my wife.
“As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit.”
Wish us luck. And don’t try this at home.
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