A Good Decade to Have a Drink

By: JONATHAN MILES
Published: January 15, 2010

BY now, most of the reviews of the decade-that-just-was have been filed, and a consensus has emerged: If not “the worst decade ever,” as Time magazine put it, the ’00s were awful.

Unless, that is, you spent the decade drinking. That sounds like a joke but isn’t, because among all the things that didn’t improve in the last 10 years — macro stuff like the global economy, geopolitical stability, the environment, etc. — one thing, admittedly micro, did improve: the drinks we drank, for pleasure or, considering the above, analgesia.

If you observed the ’00s from a barstool, and limited your reading to cocktail menus (as I did, as author of this column for almost four years), you’d be forgiven for deeming the decade a bona fide golden age. For my final column, then, a toast: to 10 years of fizzes, slings, juleps, sours, cobblers and rickeys, to a time when the avant-garde seemed to shift almost nightly, to the best decade in generations. Read the full story