How to Read the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails

After purchasing the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (November 2021, Oxford University Press), I would jump around entries, starting out looking for the creation date of a cocktail, for example, that would lead me to read a different entry about its creator, and then following along to the bar that the inventor worked at, and so on; like skipping around Wikipedia but just for classic cocktails. I knew, however, that I would miss a lot of entries this way, and since there are so many interesting facts in so many entries, I decided I needed a more thorough method for reading it.

In 2024 I read all 800+ pages of The Oxford Companion to Spirits and C o cktails, and I recommend that other serious drinks enthusiasts do as well, despite the size of the project. Designed as a reference book, it consists of a foreword, introduction
a topical outline of entries, The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (A-Z), an appendix featuring a timeline of spirits and distillation and a second appendix of how to mix drinks, a directory of contributors and an index. You might be wondering why anyone would choose to read it cover to cover. And how would they tackle it?

How I Read an Encyclopedia

Small bites

Digital version
Set deadlines

To give myself some structure I read the ‘A’ entries for the first two weeks of January, then the ‘B’ entries in the next two weeks, and so on. With 26 letters in the alphabet and 52 weeks in the year, this worked out nicely! Some letters’ entries were longer than others of course, so some weeks it felt like a lot of work. (Reading a novel is a lot easier than reading an encyclopedia, it turns out.) After I finished the entries for each time period I had “free time” to read other books until my next deadline. I’m glad I did it this way rather than attempting to read it straight through at the exclusion of other material.

Though I own the hardcover of the book, I found myself mostly reading the e-book instead. The print copy is heavy and hard to read on the bus commuting to work, never mind in bed. There’s another good reason to read the electronic version, though—it’s searchable. The print book does not have much of an index, and as I reference this book constantly, the ability to search inside entries is crucial.

Who Wrote It?

The Oxy (as I call it) was edited by David Wondrich (author of Imbibe and Punch, and longtime contributor to Esquire Magazine and The Daily Beast among other publications), with Noah Rothbaum. Wondrich wrote probably the majority of the book’s content. The rest of the roughly 1200 entries were written by more than 150 contributors (including me, I wrote a single entry); mostly the top living authors and experts in their fields.

I read everything I can about cocktails and spirits, so I was familiar with many of these experts and their writing styles. A fun little game I played while reading was trying to guess who the author of each entry was before I reached the end where that was listed- and as I got deeper into the book I’d estimate I was getting almost 70% of them right. (This was a little easier than it sounds, as Wondrich wrote so many entries, but also he has a distinctive writing style that’s easy to spot.)

What’s in It?

Historical entries
Science entries
International entries

Historical entries

As for the content of the book, it covers the history of cocktails, bars, bartenders, and spirits from ancient times up until the early cocktail renaissance. I found it interesting that the history of various spirits is so widely uneven – it seems we know a lot about the early origins of rum and arak compared with gin, for example, even though rum was distilled in many sugarcane-growing regions around the globe, while gin comes from a relatively small geographic area. Distillation itself has a pretty murky history, probably developing independently in different parts of the world, and with relatively little known about its origins in ancient China.

Science entries

Speaking of distillation, the Oxy contains a lot of production detail on making spirits, with a lot more science than I would have expected from a general-audience encyclopedia. I always thought that fermentation and distillation were most challenging parts of making distilled spirits to understand, but they seem simple compared with the science and processes for saccharification (breaking down complex starches into fermentable sugars), and of barrel aging. I just searched my e-book reader and the word ‘lignin’ appears 26 times; ‘tannin’ appears 69 times.

International entries

I found a lot of value in the book’s international survey of spirits and cocktails, revealing how and why spirits developed where they did and when they did. Each major region of the world had its own entry describing the history of its native beverages and how things like the local climate and agriculture, governments, religions, and technological advances influenced their creation and consumption. Further, for most spirits and fortified wines, the authors explained how they are consumed in their native lands, such as how many spirits that Americans always mix into cocktails are sipped neat in their homelands or only during meals.

Why Read it?

The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails is an incredible accomplishment completed by probably the only person in the world who could do it justice. David Wondrich has given us the best resource for true and correct (as we know it today) information on cocktails and spirits. For me, it has already become the first place I begin almost every investigation into any alcohol-related subject I’m curious about. Sometimes, that’s for facts and dates of when things were created; other times, it’s for that perspective on where and why they did. The Oxy doesn’t purport to tell the long version of individual entries but a quick glance at the sources cited will lead readers to the next definitive texts on the subjects.

A Hack To Reading it

If I had to read it all over again, I would highlight (using that function on the e-book reader) more of the surprising facts that jumped out to me on each entry, or at least the sentences that made me say “Oh, Now I get it!” That way I could quickly identify them on reread.

That said, there will be plenty of opportunities for highlighting material in the future. It is impossible to keep all this information in one’s brain (or at least, in my brain) at the same time. I’ve already reread dozens of entries while searching for one thing or another, and each time I’m like, “How interesting! I’m going to have to remember that.”

I never do, but at least now I always know where to look.

ReviewCamper EnglishFebruary 12, 2025Comment