Matthew Wyne

Within a year of the Barrel Aged Negroni’s debut, every bar that took itself seriously had a barrel on their backbar. Within a year of the Barrel Aged Negroni’s debut, every bar that took itself seriously had a barrel on their backbar. While “borough drinks” spread the cocktail phenomenon in the pre-Prohibition era, “neighborhood drinks” took up the mantle in the Renaissance, led by Vincenzo Erri... The various components of the Ritz cocktail already existed when the drink became a sensation, but it took the right person, at the right time, in the right place...

Today it’s hard to imagine a time when mezcal wasn’t part of the cocktail canon- Today it’s hard to imagine a time when mezcal wasn’t part of the cocktail canon- Gin was a pillar of Classic Age Cocktails, but it wasn’t until the Gin Gin Mule that it was restored back to its proper place in contemporary mixology. The various components of the Ritz cocktail already existed when the drink became a sensation, but it took the right person, at the right time, in the right place...

What craft cocktails needed most to go from elite privilege to widespread patronage was a bar where not-rich people would be so overwhelmed by a relentless pursuit of perfection that they couldn’t help but fall in love with the cause. I’ll cover two of them here in this blog, the Penicillin and the Red Hook, but the Goldrush, the Bensonhurst, and the Paper Plane were also created at Milk and Honey, which is odd, because Sasha himself put little stock in making new drinks. I was lucky enough to drink a Penicillin in the space where Milk and Honey changed cocktail history. The various components of the Ritz cocktail already existed when the drink became a sensation, but it took the right person, at the right time, in the right place...

We’re covering a couple cocktails from the second category, the Gin Gin Mule and the Mojito, but the Chartreuse Swizzle occupys a slightly different, very unusual territory. Monks still prepare Chartreuse, but marketing and distribution have been modernized, so when the craft cocktail movement started taking off and spirits brands began sponsoring cocktail competitions, Chartreuse jumped on the bandwagon. While Chartreuse is still a pretty odd base spirit for a drink, it isn’t the only hard-to-find ingredient in its eponymous swizzle. It’s one thing to create a great cocktail that uses the formula of an established recipe; Marcovaldo created a new model with the Chartreuse Swizzle.