New Orleans Spirits Competition will debut first winners at Tales of the Cocktail – NOLA.com

Wine and liquor store shelves are full of tags and signs noting numerical grades and medals for some bottles. The scores and awards come from spirit competitions from many other cities, but not New Orleans.

Local spirits writer Wayne Curtis and partners Andrew Faulkner and Matt Sharpe are about to change that. They’re introducing the first New Orleans Spirits Competition as part of Tales of the Cocktail this week. The winners will be announced at the Meet the Distillers event on July 29, the final day of the conference.

“There are a lot of competitions,” says Curtis, who serves as a judge at a couple of them every year. “If you go to a liquor store, you see the neck tags, and shelf talkers tell you, ‘It got a 96 in San Francisco’ or ‘91 in Chicago.’ But there’s never a New Orleans one. Why isn’t there a New Orleans one? We have automatic credibility in the drinking world. We’ve always been a spirits-heavy city. We felt that we should be represented on the shelves around the country and around the world. We’re hoping to build that over the next few years — something that is significant and respected.”

The judging runs July 22-24, just before the start of the 20th anniversary of Tales of the Cocktail. The annual cocktail conference draws global liquor companies, craft distillers, bartenders, spirits writers, cocktail enthusiasts and more to New Orleans. This year’s events run July 25-29 at venues around the city.

The spirits competition will make the most of the bartenders, spirits writers and tastemakers who have frequented Tales of the Cocktail over the years. Judges include Dale DeGroff, one of the founders of the craft cocktail movement, spirits writer Dave Wondrich, bartenders Alex Day of Death & Co. and Tiffanie Barriere and more.

The competition has received more than 500 spirits, ranging from vodka and whiskey to Chinese-made baijiu, Korean soju and exotic liqueurs. Judging panels are organized to include at least one bartender and one distiller each. The competition will be the first to draw heavily on bartenders and not just distillers, Curtis says. It also is rare in that it puts major liquor brands and craft distillers in the same competition. It’s a way for some of the smaller distillers to have a bigger voice at Tales, Curtis says.

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Tales has already had an impact on distillers. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the tiki expert behind Latitude 29 in the French Quarter, will participate on a panel talking about spirits that were devised at the conference. His input helped create Plantation Rum’s overproof O.F.T.D. rum. Plantation’s Stiggins Pineapple Rum also was inspired at Tales, Berry says.

Berry is a regular speaker at Tales, and for more than 10 years, he and Wondrich have hosted their Nixology seminar, in which they hash out the principles of good and bad drinks. They also puzzle out “what makes some bad drinks good, and some good drinks bad,” Berry says.

Some positive principles include making sure a drink has a dominant spirit as a spine to hang other flavors on. They also have looked skeptically at trends, such as tiki enthusiasts packing too many ingredients into a cocktail, or “salad” drinks such as carrot martinis and whiskey beet cocktails.

But they marvel at oddities that do and don’t work. Berry was surprised when a Willard Hotel — a mix of apricot and peach brandies and lime — wasn’t bad. He also doubted the Gene Ahern’s Gloom Chaser, named for the cartoonist.

“The recipe is a proto-Long Island Iced Tea,” Berry says. “If you look at it on paper, it shouldn’t work.”

Berry actually liked the mix of light rum, Haitian rum, Cointreau, cognac, cola and lemon juice, and they’ll serve it at the seminar. He also wanted to serve a Shalom Cooler — a blend of Manischewitz and Mogen David wine garnished with a matzoh ball — but Wondrich nixed the idea.

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Tales started as a cocktail festival, drawing locals and tourists to New Orleans for walking tours, seminars on local drinking lore and dinners with chefs and bartenders matching drinks and courses. As it grew, it found a niche bridging the worlds of bartenders and distillers.

Tales now features a wide range of events, including big parties thrown by the world’s largest liquor companies, some of which are by invitation only. They also host tasting rooms and events open to conference participants. There are spirited dinners with liquor brands and bartenders or brand ambassadors collaborating with local restaurants. There also are bar takeovers by high-end bars and bartenders from other cities.

Seminars cover a wide range of topics, from the history of distillation to Indigenous identity and cocktail creation (check out Gambit’s interview with Chockie Tom).

The conference also offers professional development, training and business seminars for bartenders and bar owners. In recent years, the festival added programs on physical and mental health for hospitality industry workers.

Local cocktail tours are still part of the mix. Curtis will lead a jaunt down Bourbon Street and talk about how the entertainment strip came to be what it is. There also is a bike tour to Marigny and Bywater bars. Frank Perez will lead a tour on gay bar history, and local bartender and cocktail expert Rhiannon Enlil will lead a tour of Sazerac history.

There is virtual access to some events as well as some free events. Visit talesofthecocktail.org for a schedule and tickets.

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