Burning Question: Why are some cocktails now all but forgotten?

Victor Laszlo calmly ordering a Champagne cocktail as the capricious Captain Renault leans in close. Concoctions in their 1940s prime were tasteful—the French 75, the gin rickey.

Don Henley bemoaning loves lost while downing another tequila sunrise. When you think of the ’70s, names like Harvey Wallbanger and Tom Collins come to mind.

These were cocktails of eras, elegant and…

OK—the ’70s had polyester, shag carpet and avocado-hued refrigerators. There’s little refined about that decade, particularly when it comes to some of the more cloying drinks. Yet even notable cocktails have been swept away by the ebb and flow of popular whim.

Why do some cocktails almost vanish—shut from public memory for long spells? Sure the tequila sunrise was a sticky-sweet screwdriver coated in grenadine. But it helped put the depravity in the Rolling Stones’ legendary “Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise Tour”—Keith Richard’s words (that he is still alive is testament to the restorative powers of alcohol...or possibly of blood transfusions). And voters frustrated by the option of Tricky Dick or the other guy urged a Harvey Wallbanger write-in campaign.

Anyway, the Collins, the Singapore sling, the Ramos gin fizz—these were solid.

“I think I’ve made about one in all my years bartending,” Kelsey Mikols of Jack’s Monterey in the Portola Hotel says of the once-renowned Singapore sling, a favorite of the Raffles Hotel stirred with pineapple juice, cherry brandy, Cointreau, grenadine, Bénédictine and bitters.

Her recollection of the Harvey Wallbanger—that other screwdriver knock-off, this time distorted by Galliano—is less vague.

“To be honest, I’ve never been asked to make that,” she says.

As Mikols sees it, the move toward fresh, local and seasonal ingredients, along with the bartender’s desire to create and the public’s longing to be wowed by something new contributes to the fall of cocktails once they become stale.

Carlos Huerta, a bartender at the legendary Sardine Factory above Cannery Row in Monterey adds another factor: the rise of new products, such as infused vodkas. He also points out that liquor representatives do a pretty fair job suggesting the possibilities of, say, elderflower liqueur. All of this inspires a constant evolution of cocktails and taste.

Ah, but before we pound the rusty nail in the coffin—sorry—of these classics, keep in mind that few ever really disappear for good. The Manhattan, the sidecar and other Gilded Age favorites were derailed by Prohibition as it dulled America’s appreciation of fine dark spirits in a wash of watered-down whiskey that persisted for decades after.

Well, I wasn’t there to experience the demise. However, David Pickerell, master distiller for Makers Mark, told Forbes magazine that “The lowest, bottom-shelf stuff being made today is better than the best whiskey made in 1947.”

Egad. No wonder everyone back then switched to Smirnoff.

Yet bartenders never really lost touch with dated recipes. They rediscovered the Manhattan and sidecar even before the mixology revolution. And while an array of new tools—bitters beyond Angostura and Peychaud’s, for example—a more adventurous clientele and higher quality spirits aided the move away from some cocktails as bartenders began to find new combinations, it also brought them back to the past.

“Every restaurant that has cocktails that pay homage to the classics in their own way,” Huerta notes.

Kasey Shirk and her crew at Rio Grill in Carmel routinely take inspiration from forgotten cocktails, often giving them a unique spin. Some time ago she brought back the Wild West era favorite known as the muleskinner—at the time concocted from rotgut whiskey made slightly more palatable with a few shots of syrupy blackberry liqueur. Of course, she gussied it up, using Buffalo Trace bourbon, a good blackberry brandy and a sprig of thyme.

Yeah, it’s hard to imagine Wild Bill or Black Bart shouting “Barkeep! Another sprig of organic thyme, please.” She further distanced it from frontier days by calling it the Cowboy’s Cup.

And Shirk isn’t done.

“I don’t see enough Collins, and that’s my personal favorite,” she says. “I’m working on reintroducing it. The Collins and the Champagne cocktail—I want to bring those back.”

At Sardine Factory, the happy hour menu features the tequila sunrise, the Harvey Wallbanger and other maligned classics.

“The cool thing about us is we are a classic restaurant,” Huerta says. The bar staff take advantage of their status to show forgotten cocktails like the Wallbanger to a new generation.

“The younger crowd asks what that is and we bring out the Galliano bottle,” he reports. “They end up liking it.”

Although Jack’s Monterey is known for their clever mixology ways, they still include the tequila sunrise on their popular Sunday “Booze Buggy,” albeit with much better tequila than was poured in the disco era.

“A drink I’ve noticed coming back is the Ramos gin fizz,” Mikols points out.

Shirk and the other Rio Grill bartenders took fizz lessons—probably private lessons, as a search of the CSU-Monterey Bay hospitality curriculum came up surprisingly blank—a year ago in preparation for the cocktail’s return.

She even shares pangs of regret about the loss of the grasshopper, that Kermit-green monstrosity of creme de menthe and creme de cacao.

“The grasshopper is one of my favorites,” she admits—on the record, too. “It tastes like cake.”

So cocktails constantly evolve. Creations like the brandy Alexander may slip into endangered species territory, and some may be presumed extinct (good riddance, mudslide). But modern day bartenders always find ways to breathe into them a new life.

It seems that apart from nostalgic trips to Singapore, only the poor sling is left out.

“We don’t get a lot of calls for it,” Huerta says. “We do get call for the Mai Tai, even though we’re not Hula’s.”