Plans have a way of contracting in direct proportion to the number of drinks consumed. What sounds brilliant before a night of carousing has begun—hey, let's have three different Bronxes at three different bars!—begins to feel imprudently ambitious when re-evaluated from a comfortable perch aboard a barstool. We're already here, so why not stay?
Tales of the Cocktail
Consume enough of these, and you may end up like the gal in the painting.
Tales of the Cocktail
These bartenders needn't wear flair. They exude it.
Details
TALES OF THE COCKTAIL Vancouver, B.C., talesofthecocktail.com. $195 (includes all seminars and events). Sun., Feb. 12–Wed., Feb. 15.
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A similar phenomenon is responsible for Tales of the Cocktail's return this month to Vancouver, B.C., the first city selected to host what amounts to an exhibition game for the renowned cocktail conference that overtakes New Orleans every July. To drum up interest in Tales' signature event down south, organizers plotted to stage capsule versions in cities across the globe, complete with celebrity bartenders, scholarly seminars on alcohol-dilution science and sweetened vinegars, industry-sponsored parties, and fancy dinners accompanied by copious amounts of booze. Rather than stretching the event over five hazy days, as it's done in New Orleans, the shot-sized Tales would open on a Sunday night and close by Tuesday. The "Tales on Tour" model was rolled out last February in Vancouver, and worked so well that it made decent sense to park the road show, at least for the time being.
"It was always meant to be one stop and move on," says Paul Tuennerman, who created the conference with his wife, Ann. "But on the last day we looked at each other, and it was like, 'How can we not come back?' We wanted a second date."
This year's wee Tales will follow much the same format as 2011's, with the addition of "spirited dinners," a New Orleans mainstay for which the city's top restaurants partner with liquor-brand ambassadors to develop multicourse dinners featuring a dram with every dish. At the Granville Room, for example, a juniper-crusted roast rack of lamb will be paired with a Last Word riff made with Beefeater 24 and hopped grapefruit bitters; the Waldorf Hotel is serving a tiger-prawn flambé with an Appleton rum punch.
Eight dinners are on the schedule, all but one starting promptly at 7 p.m. The next day's seminars also run simultaneously, so drinkers must decide whether they care more about liqueur filtering or oak-aged rum—or nursing their hangovers. "Tales on Tour" doesn't assail its guests with the drumfire of boozy options that defines the New Orleans bacchanal, but a first-timer still risks becoming overwhelmed: Three cocktails is the seminar standard at Tales, and most presenters greatly exceed it.
Tickets are now available at talesofthecocktail.com. To help Seattle drinkers make the most of their first Tales, we asked Tuennerman and a pair of Vancouver bartenders how to approach the event. Their wise suggestions:
Spit! You're on your own when you're slurping your way through drinks stiffened with bitters at Tales' Valentine's Day farewell party, but every seminar table and tasting room is equipped with spit buckets. Jay Jones, a bartender at the Shangri-La Hotel and the Tuennermans' onsite event coordinator, recommends using them. "You don't have to finish every drink," he cautions. "Some people, myself included, will probably enjoy the entire thing, but you don't have to. The next free drink is never far away at Tales, so there's no valid rationale for wolfing . . . It's a party, but we want to keep a leash on it."
Tuennerman says the decade-old event has had remarkably little trouble with drunken misbehavior: "We've never really had an issue." Perhaps that's because if you finish every drink you're handed, you don't have the wherewithal to scale a telephone pole or run naked down the street.
Drink water. What makes sense in hot, humid New Orleans, where the specter of dehydration is a constant companion, is also sound advice in rainy Vancouver. "Pace yourself and drink lots of water," Tuennerman says. "It's meant to be a learning experience, not a drunken experience."
Don't play favorites. Most drinkers have opinions as strong as their cocktails, but Lauren Mote of Kale & Nori says it's a mistake to build an itinerary around biases. Rather than sign up for seminars and dinners featuring spirits you love, she suggests, concentrate on topics and tasting rooms which initially don't seem appealing. "First-timers have to try everything," she says. "Some people only like to drink vodka, and everything else gives them a headache. Remember the people hosting this are experts in their field."
On one end of the snobbery spectrum, Jones suspects, a few attendees will hesitate to register for a tequila seminar because the spirit doesn't have the cachet of whiskeys. "Tequila gets a bad rap because people have bad experiences in Mexico," he says. "The best part is discovering something new."
Share your badge. I always believed the reason names weren't printed on Tales identification tags was that registrants didn't want strangers to hold them responsible later for their drunken indiscretions. Jones provided a less-cynical explanation: The badges are made to be shared. Tales doesn't care if a dozen drinkers go in on a single all-access pass (a $195 proposition that includes everything on the Vancouver calendar except a Spirited Dinner), so long as the purchasers take turns using it—an especially good deal if prospective attendees have different work schedules, Jones points out. "Share the badge," he says. "We'd love to reach as many people as possible."
