![]() ![]() Tamagno’s work still evokes the glamor and excitement of the Moulin Rouge, and it’s no wonder original posters from the era sell for thousands of dollars on the auction market. Cointreau had elevated the advertising poster to fine art status, and works would soon be displayed in galleries around Paris. These were stunning examples of fin de siècle Post-Impressionism art. Working with celebrated artist Nicolas Tamagno, early print ads featured a mascot known as Pierrot Cointreau, a white-faced pantomime with a frilly collar and pointed hat. As early as 1898, Cointreau had undergone the unique step of setting up its own in-house advertising studio. If booze advertising can often be a scourge of capitalism, relentless demands to buy this so you’ll be more that, Cointreau has always taken a more artsy tact. Photo credit: Allie Holloway Even the ads are cool. Though often-mocked today, the classic Cosmo was more critical to today’s booming cocktail culture than it ever gets credit for. By the end of the 1990s, a new cocktail culture was forming on the coasts, with forgotten drinks from the past being revived and a whole slew of modern classics being imagined, like the Joy Division, which paired dry gin with dry vermouth, absinthe, and, yes, Cointreau. That version would become an immediate sensation, getting cocktail drinkers again used to the idea of fresh ingredients and elegant, stemmed glassware. Liking the name and its light pink color, however, Cecchini decided to make one more upscale, with fresh lime juice, citron vodka, and, yes, Cointreau. He’d heard of a drink called the Cosmopolitan making the rounds of gay bars in San Francisco it featured well vodka with bottled lime juice and sickly sweet grenadine. Photo credit: Allie Holloway You could argue it jump-started the modern cocktail revival.īy the late-1980s, American cocktail culture had devolved into luridly named drinks packed with cheap schnapps or, even worse, artificial “mixes.” Enter Toby Cecchini, then bartending at the Odeon, a trendy bistro in lower Manhattan. That zip of lemon-flavored vodka, the sharp acidity of lime juice, the sweet tartness of cranberry, with one crucial ingredient tying them all together: Cointreau. Because at age 40, I was blown away by how delicious a perfectly made Cosmo actually is. Blame Samantha Jones or the rise of IPAs or the toxic masculinity of youth, but I’d been missing out. I’ve had a career as a beverage writer for the last decade! And, yet, I’d always avoided them. ![]() I’d been a young twentysomething in New York during the heyday of Sex and the City. How had I gone this long without trying such an infamous cocktail? I’d lived in the drink’s epicenter, New York, for the last two decades. No, I didn’t stockpile toilet paper or grow a sourdough starter or start meditating-what I did was drink a Cosmopolitan. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.Įarlier this year, at the ripe old age of 40, I did something I’d never done before. ![]()
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