Liquid Legends Series

Dave Wondrich
August 13-15

Liquid Legends is The Vault’s year-long guest series honoring the bartenders, writers, and historians who shaped modern cocktail culture. Each installment celebrates a pivotal moment in cocktail history with a limited-run menu and a two-night, in-person collaboration.

David Wondrich took his PhD in Comparative Literature and applied it to the unexplored mass of old bartender's guides, yellowed newspaper clippings, drink-stained menus, throwaway brochures and other such ephemera where the true, and often surprising history of the cocktail and those who mixed and drank it is entombed. The results of his research can be found in his seven books on the topic, including the James Beard Award-winning Imbibe! (2007 and 2015), Punch (2010), The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (2021; awarded the Dartmouth Medal for best reference book of the year by the American Library Association) and his latest, The Comic Book History of the Cocktail (2025), as well as countless articles for Esquire, the Daily Beast, Imbibe and several dozen other fine publications. He lives in Brooklyn and Trieste, Italy.