Tales of the Tales

I returned home to Maine tonight afer several days of sophisticated sipping in New Orleans at the fourth annnual Tales of the Cocktail, held mostly at the Hotel Monteleone.

This was my second year here, and I could still only marvel at seeing so many cocktail illuminati together. The parties and symposia were ideal venues to catch up on what's going on in the world of cocktails and spirits. At dinner the first night I shared a table with Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh, Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club, Ryan Magarian of Liquid Kitchen, Gwydion Stone of The Wormwood Society, and Paul Clarke, who writes the great drinking blog Cocktail Chronicles. Paul happened to have lauded "And a Bottle of Rum" just the day before, calling it "the finest narrative overview of spirits and cocktails since William Grimes’ Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail." (But I blush!)

I signed a a few dozen of copies of my book at the big cocktail party on Thursday night (where many other cocktail authors also served drinks and signed books) and served as co-host of a sublime dinner held at the Court of the Two Sisters, with wonderful drinks created by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry and Somer Perez of the restaurant Beacon in New York.

Friday morning started off with a talk by Ted Breaux on absinthe, with sniffings of actual wormwood and tastings of actual French and Swiss absinthe. (That's my stepdaughter, Addie, sampling in the photo.) Followed that day by, well, some other cocktail stuff. It's all a bit blurry. Paul Clarke peformed a valuable public service reporting on the event, and I encourage you to head over to Cocktail Chronicles to catch up on it.

More so, I encourage you to attend next year: organizers are already talking about a panel on rums, and I'm hoping to help pull that together. I don't know if the exact dates are set yet.... just to make sure, I urge you to leave July and August wholly open next year to ensure no conflicts with a trip to New Orleans.