David Wondrich just published The Comic Book History of the Cocktail. No better time then to ask our industry’s pre-eminent historian the most simple – and complex – of questions: which country invented the cocktail?

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But hold on there. If you accept that first definition – “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters” – as gospel, what is to be made of Richard Stoughton’s 1690 suggestion that you soothe your hangover by mixing the wildly popular stomach elixir he invented – known to all as ‘Stoughton’s bitters’ due to its “pleasant, though bitterish taste” – with a glass of sweet, fortified wine? Functionally, I can’t see what besides a little bartending separates his wine, with its sugars, alcohol and water already baked in, from the American mix of “spirits…, sugar and water”. Add some dashes of Stoughton’s bitters to it, and wasn’t that more or less the same thing as a cocktail? The problem is, Stoughton was English, and he was working in London.

So. Britain – England, London – for the initial structure of the drink, and even for its name, although it took Americans to join the one to the other. (‘Cocktail’ was originally British sporting-life slang for the dose of ginger or cayenne you gave a worn-out horse to make it wave its tail around all frisky-like when you were trying to sell it; don’t ask how it was administered.) But America took it from there, right? Good. Now that we’ve settled –

“Attendez un bon moment, monsieur!” I seem to hear someone interjecting, emphatically. “Et la France, c’est rien?” Well, OK. No, France isn’t nothing in all this. When Americans had taken Dr Stoughton’s formula, overhauled it, pasted the name ‘cocktail’ on it (for its frisky-making effects of a morning), and enlisted it as the flagship of their flotilla of enticing new drinks, the world – or at least the drinking parts of it – grew curious.

London was the first to sprout so-called ‘American bars’, where you could get a cocktail, Julep or Cobbler more or less – though more often less, it seems – like the ones in New York, Boston or Washington DC. But the soil in London was wrong for these drinks, and the early bars quickly withered away. That was in the 1840s.

Lasting foothold

In Paris, however, a few years later, the same sprouts would put forth luxuriant foliage and stretch their roots deep. Which is a fancy way of saying that France provided the American-style bar, where you could get an individual iced drink mixed to order, its first lasting foothold outside its home soil. (I’m ignoring Canada here, because its drinking culture is a parallel shoot from the same root as that of the United States.) All right then. London, Paris; but then it’s Yankees –

“Ma senti, signore, ci siamo qui anche noi!” What – now the Italians? I see how this is going to go. But when you think about it they are indeed here too, and not just because of the brigata of absolutely stellar bartenders – as skilled as they’ve been charming – Italy has sent forth to serve in every reach of the globe. 

There’s also the matter of vermouth. Sure, French vermouth made it into the US as early as the 1830s, but good luck finding any American bartenders mixing drinks with it (its time would come, of course). It was only with the reunification of Italy in the 1860s and the wave of exports from newly-energised Italian producers such as Martini & Sola, Fratelli Cora and Cinzano that the stuff, in its richer, sweeter and more easily approachable Italian form, made it behind the American cocktail bar. Results? Boom! The Martini, the Manhattan, both introduced at the dawn of the 1880s. With them and their many close relations, the cocktail is suddenly a much more capacious drink, more complex and flexible. I’d like to say something here about how seamlessly and quickly American mixologists adapted to this new ingredient, but I know that somebody –

“¡Oiga, señor! ¡No se olvide de Cuba!” Yep. Another one. But fair enough: beginning at the very end of the 1800s, Cuba took the basic framework of the American cocktail and kitted it out with a whole new vocabulary of ingredients. Tropical ones. Limes instead of lemons, pineapples, coconuts, grapefruit. Lighter-bodied, subtle rums instead of not only the rich old Jamaica ones Americans had favoured, but gin and whiskey too.

In Cuban hands, a simple Rum Sour – rum, sugar, citrus juice – became an ethereal little pool of interstellar comet-ice. The Cubans even used a third kind of vermouth, besides the Italian sweet one that went into Manhattans and the French dry one that had recently snuck into the Martini to make it ‘Dry’. ‘Chambery’, as it was called, was white and French, but silky and lightly sweet rather than bone-dry, and they mixed it with Cuban rum and drops of curaçao and grenadine to make the Presidente, which bears roughly the same relation to the burly old Manhattan that Benicio del Toro does to Tom Hardy.

If my computer could do Japanese characters I’m pretty sure we’d hear from Japan here, too, because in the post-World War II years, when this lovely, complex art staggered in America and Europe, the Japanese kept its elegance and its sleek sexiness alive. They preserved both the craft of the cocktail and the art of it, so that when the world was sick of Sexes on the Beach and Harveys Wallbanger there was someone there who could show everyone how it should be done, or at least how they did it in the
old days.

And if I were to stick around longer, no doubt we’d hear from others, too; countries such as Germany, which contributed so many genius mixologists to the first Golden Age of the American – or should we say ‘American’? – bar, and Mexico, whose agave distillates have done so much to propel the institution into the 21st century.

We’d probably even hear from the Americans. After all, we brought the ice.  

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David Wondrich is the author of, most recently, The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On (Ten Speed Graphic, 2025), and the editor in chief of the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (Oxford University Press, 2021).