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INGREDIENTS FOR MORE THAN GREAT DRINKS THE COCKTAIL LOVERS.COM SPRING 2024

ISSUE 48

ISSN 2052-059X

Shaking things up

Widows peak

Role models

PAGE 30

PAGE 28

PAGE 26

The changing face of bars and the people who own them

CHANGE MAKERS

Key figures who have changed the way we think about how we drink

In praise of the widows who put the sparkle in Champagne

Leaders of the London drinks scene – then and now

contents 08 30

News, views, reviews and interviews, including cocktail books with a female focus, five amazing women in cocktail history, where they’re drinking in Madrid and whisky in focus with Becky Paskin

Shaking things up

Kate Malczewski hears from

women+ calling the shots in their own bars

11 reasons to shop female-founded drinks brands Our pick of brilliant bottles made with passion and purpose

In the hotseat

36 On top of the world

Sister acts

40 Changemakers

Mallory O’Meara, award-winning author of Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol

The brightest ways to up your glassware game

Talking women in top positions with global head of World Class and advocacy, Marissa Johnston

Five women who have been pivotal in changing the way we think about how we drink. By Laura Foster

26 Role models

42 Out of the shadows

28 Widows peak

48 The Ada effect

Looking back at our featured leading ladies of the London drink scene in 2014 – where are they now?

In praise of the inspirational widows who revolutionised the world of Champagne. By Claire Dodd

Photo story: Revolutionary women in drinks in the spotlight. Photographed by Gary Smith

Introducing The Ada Coleman Project, the brand new initiative by women, for women, inspired by Ada Coleman

Call to action

In praise of inspirational women

Liquid intelligence/ Take 3 ingredients

Anna Sebastian on what needs to be done to attract women to hospitality and how to retain them once there

By men in the industry they ’ve

inspired

With Zoe Burgess and Esther Medina-Cuesta

Issue 48 Spring 2024 Editors Sandrae Lawrence Gary Sharpen Creative director Scott Bentley – Bentley Creative Copy editing Laura Hill Cover photography Gary Smith Contributors Kristine Bocchino, Zoe Burgess, Esther Medina-Cuesta, Claire Dodd, Laura Foster, Troels Knudsen, Kate Malczewski, Anna Sebastian, Kaitlin Wilkes

For all editorial and advertising enquiries, please contact:

(+44) 020 7242 2546 mail@thecocktaillovers.com

Find us:

TheCocktailLovers.com @cocktaillovers meet.thecocktaillovers @thecocktaillovers

Parting Shot

Raising a glass to the bars and bartenders of Italy

Mains & Martinis

Big up Birmingham

The best flavours from Britain, west Africa and Calcutta brought to you by way of three award-winning London restaurants

Look out London, Birmingham bars are looking at your crown

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Reproduction in whole or part of any contents of The Cocktail Lovers Magazine without prior permission from the editors is strictly prohibited. All details of bars featured in this issue were correct at time of going to press. Please see individual websites for up-to-date information. The Cocktail Lovers Magazine is printed in the UK by Stephens & George.

PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY

TALKING TEQUILA

If you thought all tequilas were created equal, sip on this! Smooth-as-you-like, this small-batch tequila is led by Bertha González Nieves, the first female Maestra Tequilera certified by the Mexican Academy of Tequila Tasters. Good vibes: The company champions sustainable production. casadragones.com

ELEVEN reasons

…to shop female-founded brands (and do some good while you’re at it)

TWO Rethinking wine

Single-origin wines brought to you from female-founded company Maivino, all packaged in stay-fresh, airtight pouches. Good vibes: The vegan wines are made with organically grown grapes that are farmed responsibly and fermented with indigenous yeast. maivino.com

THREE

Feeling the spirit From grain to glass, the gin and bourbon from this women-owned and run distillery in Portland are crafted entirely in the Pacific Northwest. Good vibes: The monthly Freeland Free Spirits campaign celebrates women+ who are making a difference in their Oregon communities. freelandspirits.com Mixing it up

Raissa and Joyce de Haas, AKA the Tonic Twins, launched their flavour-led tonics and mixers in 2015, with the award-winning duo now producing a 12-strong range. Good vibes: They’ve set up the Double Dutch Scholarship Programme to empower female bartenders in the UK. doubledutchdrinks.com

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APERITIVO

SEXING UP THE APERITIF

Watch out Aperol, there’s a new aperitif in town! Co-founder Malin Spano’s Pomello is a delightful blend of zesty pomelo and floral elderflower, making for a beautifully balanced spritz. pomello.world

FIVE

BREWING UP A STORM

Give it up for community advocate and beer pioneer Celeste Beatty of Harlem Brewing Company, the first Black woman to own a craft brewery in the US. Good vibes: Celeste is working on an initiative to get Black farmers growing grain for brewing and distilling. harlembrewing.com

Making the cut

Passion is at the heart of The Heart Cut, the independent single-cask and small-batch whisky and spirits company cofounded by whisky expert Georgie Bell (p. 26). Make this your first stop if you’re after one-off bottlings from some of the most exciting producers around the world. theheartcut.com

SEVEN

Championing style AND substance Laura Giraudo’s eye for detail doesn’t end with her work at her Brooklyn-based design studio; it extends to the creation of limitededition, artisan mezcal that’s crafted in small batches and housed in exquisite ceramic vessels. Good vibes: One agave is replanted in Oaxaca for each bottle of Batch 03 sold. oaxoriginal.com 19 THE COCK TAIL LOVERS / ISSUE 48

THE PIONEERS

In praise of the visionary widows who put the sparkle into Champagne. By Claire Dodd

T Top: Ethan Boroian; Above: Madame Clicquot

hey had good taste. They had business savvy. They had death certificates for their husbands, and no one to stand in their way. It’s only a combination of those three specific things that gave them the ability to build the Champagne market we see today. In the undisputed ‘man’s world’ of the 18th century, the widows of Champagne not only refined and diversified the liquid itself, but arguably created the market for it. Among the bereaved matriarchs from the likes of Veuve (meaning widow) Clicquot, Pommery, Laurent-Perrier, Veuve Fourny and more, their many achievements include removing the sediment, refining the bubbles to a fine

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mousse, inventing vintages and rosé, creating the bottle shape, reducing the sweetness of the wine, marketing it as a luxury, and truly taking it international. Death created a cohort of arguably the world’s first businesswomen. What a peculiar concept. “Back then, in the 1800s, the only way women could actually own a business [without the permission of a father or husband], was if they were declared widows. That was the loophole,” says Ethan Boroian, global grand vintage ambassador at Moët Hennessy, and a Madame Clicquot fan. (It’s hard not to be one.) Born Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin in 1777, Clicquot was widowed in 1805, taking on the business founded by her father-in-law in 1772. She was 27, and went on to create the first known vintage Champagne, the riddling table to collect sediment and the first known blended rosé. All of which earned her the nickname ‘la grande dame’ of Champagne. “When she said she wanted to take over the house, her father-in-law said, ‘you can’t, it’s against the law’. She proved him wrong,” adds Boroian, noting that when she took it on, Champagne was a regional product, and liquid-wise, quite unlike what we know today. Amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, she refined it, and took it to the world stage. “With barricades all around Europe, she can’t get her product out to the biggest markets which are at the time Russia and the States,” explains Boroian. “She positions her product in the Netherlands, on the borders, so it will be the first to get out once the barricades are lifted. Personality-wise, they say she had an iron fist in a velvet glove. She was a visionary, she did things in her own way. But she was super clever and aware that the odds were against her.” Of course, other widows followed, blazing their own trails, moving outside of convention and writing their own playbooks. Actually, here’s an odd fashion trend for you – widowhood. So successful were they, many houses added ‘Veuve’ to their names, whether they could claim a widow or not. But, so many young widows, I hear you say? All at the same time? “There were so many conspiracy theories of women poisoning their husbands so they could actually work,” adds Boroian. “Now, we don’t know if that’s true or not, but certainly in Champagne, there was a mystery going around.” Beyond the intrigue, novelty and

Left: Madame Lily Bollinger and the Bollinger Estate; Below: A bottle of Laurent-Perrier

Their many achievements include removing the sediment, refining the bubbles to a fine mousse, inventing vintages and rosé… speculation, what stood the widows apart, businesswise that is? Without wanting to fall into sexist tropes, it seems their superpower was their ability to, say it with me, listen: to listen to what the markets wanted, and adapt the wine and marketing accordingly.

Visionaries

Take Louise Pommery for example. She took the helm aged 39 upon the death of her husband in 1858, moving the business and massively expanding the estate. In response to demands from, not least, the British market, she’s perhaps

Louise Pommery and the new bottle celebrating 150 years

most known for taking the wine from very sweet to dry, vastly increasing consumption moments. “She was a visionary, and she never stopped,” says Florence Prévoteau, marketing product manager at Vranken Pommery Monopole. “She controlled everything from the vineyard to the merchandise. We still work in the buildings and cellars she created, making the wines she created.” But we don’t have to look too far back for the widows. During the occupation of France in World War II, Madame Lily Bollinger took over the house on her husband’s death in 1941, aged just 42, continuing through to 1971. Her firsts? Rebuilding the estate post-war, she launched the first wines made from old vines. She created RD or Récemment Dégorgé (recently disgorged) wines. And, again on the theme of international expansion, she established the brand in the US, launching marketing campaigns in New York in the 1950s. During these war years, LaurentPerrier too was helmed by a widow. In fact, not to be outdone, the house can claim two. MathildeEmilie Perrier took over from her husband in 1887; and MarieLouise de Nonancourt, a widow with four children, poured all of

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her savings into Domaine Laurent‑Perrier in 1939, steering the company through the war years, before passing the business to her son.

The widow’s legacy

These women, by a quirk of law, may have created a category, liquids, packaging and brands that endure to this day. But in 2024, 220 years after Madame Clicquot took over her business, it’s striking that the question we have to ask is not if women are leading, but do they even have parity? Today, what’s women’s place in wine? And what’s their place in the wider drinks industry? Currently there are 412 Masters of Wine, of which, just over a third are women. It’s sobering that all these years later it’s still considered a, albeit joyous, novelty or a point worthy of mention whenever we see a company that is female owned and run. We embrace them proudly. But when it comes to the widows, they were, and still are, starkly ahead of their time.

Kate Malczewski gets the drinks in at her favourite female-owned bars

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FEMALE OWNED BARS

Clockwise from left: The plush red velvet fittings at Doña; Nobody’s Darling; Renauda Riddle and Angela Barnes; Julie Reiner

ulie Reiner is a leading light of the global bar scene – but when she started her career in hospitality 30 years ago as a cocktail waitress, she never imagined she’d even have the opportunity to be a bartender. “It really was a very male-dominated industry,” Reiner recalls. “Women and people of colour were rarely hired as bartenders, and fewer were bar owners.” In many ways, the industry has become a more welcoming place for everyone since then. “The strides we have seen over the past 15 years have been incredible,” she notes. “But there is more work to be done.” Reiner herself has put in this work by mentoring other women in the industry, and by creating venues that “are open and accessible to everyone”, from Clover Club, her Brooklyn bar with relaxed vibes, to Milady’s, the neighbourhood dive bar she helped revive in Manhattan in 2022. She’s not alone in her efforts. There

are many women in the field who are consciously shaping their bars to be inclusive environments for both guests and employees, resulting not only in standout hospitality experiences, but also in a more equitable industry as a whole.

Chicago warriors

In Chicago, Renauda Riddle and Angela Barnes recognised a dearth of venues with an intersectional focus, so they made their own. In 2021, they opened Nobody’s Darling in the city’s Andersonville district. As Black queer women themselves, they wanted it to be a place that champions women, people of colour (POC) and the LGBTQ+ community while welcoming all. “We understood the need for a POC-centred space, where queer people and everyone from the community could come in and just be themselves,” says Riddle. Nobody’s Darling takes a detail-oriented

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approach to centring and celebrating women. The cocktail menu draws inspiration from Black female artists, and the back bar is stocked with women- and POC-owned spirits. (Another little touch that speaks volumes? The free menstrual products and toiletries in the bathrooms. “Those things make a difference, and people notice them,” Riddle says.) The bar is named after the Alice Walker poem Be Nobody’s Darling, which is all about carving your own path. The message resonated with Riddle as a first-time bar owner. “It’s rare to have women in the industry, and definitely Black women in the industry, who have never really worked behind the bar,” she explains. “So this is something we’re taking on and doing our own way.” So far, so successful: Nobody’s Darling expanded its space last autumn to keep up with demand, and a second branch on Chicago’s South Side is in the works. Across the pond, East London bar

PHOTO STORY

Head bartender, bar owner, master blender, author and bootlegger. Meet five women who may not be household names but they’ve all significantly paved a way, radically changed preconceptions and made a big difference. Wherever or whatever we drink today, their presence is subtly there. Photography Gary Smith Drinks stylist Troels Knudsen

THE MASTER BLENDER

Joy Spence

Some 16 years after joining Appleton Estate as chief chemist, 1997 sees Joy Spence become the first female master blender in the spirits industry. She is still at the helm today.

Jamaican Mule 50ml Appleton Estate Signature Rum 50ml ginger beer 3 lime wedges Method: Muddle the lime wedges in a tall glass. Add the other ingredients along with ice and stir.

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THE COCKTAIL GIRL RELISHES… Drinking in the history of Campari in Italy When in Milan, you’ve got to do the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. And when you’re in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, you’ve got to do Camparino in Galleria. Not that I’m a fan of doing overtly touristy things. Particularly shopping or drinking in malls. But this one is different. It’s not really a mall, it’s too majestic for that. In truth, it’s a thing of drop-dead gorgeousness. Put it this way, not for nothing is it dubbed Milan’s drawing room. Stunning architecture and drool-worthy designer stores aside (including the first Prada store in the world and the only place where you can still buy its handmade bags and luggage). I love drinking in its history. Literally. And the place to do that is Camparino in Galleria. Established in 1915 by Davide Campari (yes, that Campari), it’s still one of the must-visit spots in town. Touristy tourists head straight for Bar di Passo. Of course they do! For one thing, it overlooks the mighty Duomo,

and another, it’s deliciously picturesque – all Art Nouveau and fab with frescoes, aged wooden bar, ornate chandeliers… in short, everything you want from a historic spot. To drink? Campari Seltz. Much like it was when the bar originally opened with its unique soda-on-tap system offering perfectly chilled Campari sodas every time. Then there’s Sala Spiritello on the first floor for a different feel and experience entirely. Here it’s more streamlined, more modern, more ‘mixology’, with cocktails like the Bitter Paloma (Campari, Espolòn Tequila Blanco, 1757 Vermouth di Torino Extra Dry, agave and pink grapefruit) and Purosangue (Campari, Biancosarti, Vermouth del Professore and traditional balsamic vinegar of Modena). Of course, I make it my business to stop in both of the above but my new favourite spot is Sala Gaspare Campari. Before I get into why it’s won me over, I have to prefix this by saying this part of Camparino

Camparino in Galleria Piazza Duomo 21, 20121, Milan

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isn’t open to the public. Well it is, but you have to book. And as it only seats 12, it’s perfect for a small group of friends. The room occupies the part of the building that was once Gaspare Campari’s lab, where he once created recipes for various cordials, bitters and vermouths. Now it’s been remodelled into a swish underground bar, and the creations are mixed by a team overseen by head of mixology Tommaso Cecca. Before the drinks though, I have to give a shout-out to Vudafieri Saverino Partners, the design team responsible for the very chic, extremely cosy makeover. Rich, warming shades of brown, hunker-down-andchill-out leather Chesterfield sofas and clever lighting set the scene, while carefully selected items from the Campari archives dotted around make the room feel even more special. And talking of archives, the vintage books in the room’s library form the basis of some of the cocktails on offer; others are inspired by the aromas and rare ingredients that Gaspare Campari used in his recipes, while the final section is dedicated to iconic cocktails like the Negroni and Boulevardier, made with rare vintage spirits from the 1950s onwards. If you and 11 friends are ever in Milan, I highly recommend it. camparino.com

OUT AND ABOUT

THE COCKTAIL GUY FINDS HIMSELF… Stopping off for a dram in London’s historic Denmark Street

Denmark Street is more than a little familiar to this cocktail guy. For far more years than I care to mention it’s been a regular shortcut of mine on the way to Soho. But it held little attraction in itself. A very short and largely unremarkable street, it’s historically been mainly about music. At one time there was an abundance of music publisher offices (earning it the name Britain’s Tin Pan Alley), then later mainly guitar shops. The last few years, though, have seen changes on the street. While the guitar shops remain, they’ve been joined by a number of new bars. The most recent being Dram. Given its name you’d think it was something of a whisky specialist. You’d be right. But it’s way more than that. And whether you’re a whisky geek, newbie or somewhere in between (like me) you’ll feel right at home. Set within a 17th-century Grade II-listed building, it has several spaces creatively spread over various floors; two bars, a whisky

Dram 7 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8LZ

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shop, an outdoor terrace and a private pool room. The first of these, the groundfloor bar, sets the tone nicely. On the one hand, there are cocktails on tap. The Mezcal & Coconut (Los Siete Misterios Mezcal, coconut water and fino). An amazing drink. Super refreshing with hidden depths. On the other hand, a glance around the room reveals it also as a showcase for a seductive array of whiskies, from the familiar to the wonderfully obscure. Better still, you can try any of them in a 35ml measure. (They feel this is perfect sampling size: more than a normal 25ml measure, but not quite as overwhelming as a double.) And if something takes your fancy you can buy the bottle to take away. The bar team, too, really know their stuff. Not in a fusty, crusty, old whisky kind of way. Instead, guests were enjoying a more ‘what’s your mood, do you like sweet or smoky, have you had dinner yet?’ sort of conversation. The downstairs cocktail bar was equally informal but with a touch more sophistication. Looking around it clearly had something of the date night about it. The lighting was a little lower. The seating a little more intimate. As for the drinks, they were equally elegant. I loved the Beetroot & Raspberry Wine (cacao butter distillate, almond and Michter’s Rye). Although a long drink, it was appealing intense. The pool room, too, lends itself to a date night. Barely bigger than the pool table itself, it’s a fun conservatory type of space. Forget how good you are at pool (I’m rubbish), the cool thing is its cocktail vending machine. Pay for your tokens in the bar downstairs then choose from a selection of ready-to-drink cocktails at the push of a button. The terrace has an intimate half-inside, half-outside feel. On our winter visit it was a lovely area to kick back and enjoy a warming whisky. On a summer night it’ll be equally appealing for a refreshing highball. Denmark Street will always be my Soho shortcut. But from now on it looks like I’ll be regularly stopping off en route for a dram or two. drambar.co.uk