A short history

The word turns up in print in 1806, in a New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository, answering a reader who had asked what a cocktail was. The answer - spirits, sugar, water and bitters - describes an Old Fashioned. That drink is the original. Everything else is a variation on it.

American Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, and the usual story is that it killed the cocktail. It's closer to say it made cocktails worse and more popular at the same time. Drinking didn't stop; it moved into speakeasies, where the spirit on hand was whatever could be produced quickly and quietly.

That pushed the whole trade from whiskey towards gin, because gin needs no ageing. You can make something gin-shaped in days, where a bourbon needs years in wood. And it pushed recipes towards heavy juice and sugar, whose job was to bury the taste of what was underneath. A lot of drinks we now think of as classics were designed as camouflage.

The other consequence was geographic. Bartenders who couldn't work in America went to Havana, London and Paris and kept working, which is why several drinks with American names were perfected somewhere else.

Cocktails fell out of fashion through the late sixties and seventies. The eighties brought them back, but with sour mix out of a soda gun and a lot of vodka standing in for gin, because vodka tastes of nothing, which is easy to sell.

What turned it round was a return to fresh citrus, real ice and pre-Prohibition recipe books. That's roughly where it has stayed. A modern craft bar is, in method, a reconstruction of the 1890s with better refrigeration.

New Zealand missed most of the cocktail's first century because the pubs shut at six. Six o'clock closing came in December 1917 as a wartime measure to head off the prohibition vote, was made permanent the next year, and stayed until 1967. The hour between the end of work and closing was spent drinking beer standing up, as fast as possible. That was the six o'clock swill, and nothing about it rewarded a slow drink or a bartender who could do more than pour.

Licensed restaurants were allowed from 1960, and the ban on barmaids ended with them. A referendum in 1967 closed the swill, with two-thirds voting for ten o'clock. The change that mattered was the Sale of Liquor Act 1989: four licence types instead of many, no requirement that a bar be a hotel, wine in supermarkets. Several thousand bars and licensed restaurants opened in the years after it. The bar culture Auckland and Wellington have now dates from then.

So a New Zealand cocktail list is young. The bars that took cocktails seriously mostly opened after 1989, and the good ones after 2000.