For fans of the show...the third season begins this next Sunday, August 16,
on the American Movie Classics cable channel... :

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/di...2don.html?_r=1

August 12, 2009

Sixties Accuracy in Every Sip

By ROBERT SIMONSON

"EARLY in Season 1 of the AMC series "Mad Men," Don Draper, the mysterious
advertising executive at the core of the show, was seen at home emptying can
after can of Fielding beer. Bloggers afflicted with the fact-checking gene
quickly noted that there was no Fielding beer in the United States at the
time.

"That was a huge mistake," said *** Perello, the show's prop master since
the second season. "I hated that label. Hated it."

Ten years ago, few would have cared whether the executives at Sterling
Cooper - the fictional 1960s advertising firm featured in the show, which
begins its third season on Sunday - entertained a client with mai tais or
bloody marys. But it was the show's good fortune (or misfortune, depending
on how you look at it) to unveil its drink-centric world at a time when a
growing fraternity of alcohol enthusiasts is rediscovering America's rich
drinking history. Now, the goof police are out.

Cocktails have been a vital element of the show right from the opening
scene, which showed Don Draper sitting in a bar. Before the audience learns
his name or his profession, he expresses his drink preference: "Do this
again - old-fashioned, please."

Other than the Fielding lapse, drink historians and barmen of a certain age
say that "Mad Men" mostly gets its bibulous world right. Dale DeGroff
benefits from a twin perspective. A former bartender at the Rainbow Room, he
is often credited with rekindling interest in classic cocktails. But in the
early 1970s, he worked at the influential advertising firm Lois Holland
Callaway. One of the agency's clients was Restaurant Associates, which ran
such sensations as the Four Seasons and Forum of the Twelve Caesars.

"These ad guys made themselves experts on all the details that needed
attention, including everything at the cocktail bars and even the wine
lists," Mr. DeGroff, 60, remembered.

That many ad men drank deeply seems unquestioned. The bartender and bar lore
archivist Brian Rea, 82, worked in the 1950s at the Little Club, a popular
Midtown restaurant. "Lunch was a big thing," he said. "They took two and a
half hours. We had a lot of agency people come in, from Cunningham & Walsh,
BBDO, all having serious lunches with drinks."

Carlo Marioni, 65, a New York bartender with more than 40 years' experience
who now works at Pietro's, agreed: "Those years, for lunch, they used to
drink three martinis. Then they'd come back before dinner for rusty nails,
white spiders."

If Mr. Rea and others give "Mad Men" high marks for nailing its milieu, part
of the credit for this achievement goes to Ms. Perello, 43, who prepares
every drink seen on the show, using nonalcoholic ingredients. "We're
definitely the alcohol department," she said. "I can make an old-fashioned
in my sleep now."

To get an idea of the popular cocktails of the time and how they looked, Ms.
Perello relies heavily on a volume from 1992 called "The Art of the
Cocktail: 100 Classic Cocktail Recipes," by Philip Collins. Little is left
to chance. "We're very picky about our glassware. Things are bit bigger and
bulkier now. For a martini glass, we go a little smaller and thinner."
Period bottle labels and caps (old-style tax stamps, yes; bar codes, no) are
recreated by the graphics department, using old ads as guides.

Occasionally, expediency dictates a decision. When an accounts executive was
sent a case of gin by some British colleagues last season, Ms. Perello chose
Tanqueray, though Beefeater then dominated the London dry gin market in the
United States. "Tanqueray has not changed their bottle," she explained.
"With Beefeater, the bottles are completely different than they were. And I
needed 12 bottles."

Liquor is not only an integral part of many plotlines (last season, it
played a pivotal role in a car crash, a divorce, a rape and two career
implosions), but often a telling sign of character. When it comes to
choosing a character's poison, Ms. Perello said, many people have input,
starting with the show's creator, Matthew Weiner: "Matt will say, 'I want
them to have a brown liquor.' And I'll go, 'Let's do a nonblended Scotch,
because this is a person who would appreciate that.' "

The cocktail historian David Wondrich, 48, thinks an old-fashioned is a
conservative choice for the young Draper, but considers his preference for
Canadian Club "exactly right. We'd had years of destruction of the American
whiskey industry up until then. So the Canadian stuff was viewed as being
pretty good."

"The big Scotches were Bell's, Black & White, Teacher's, White Horse," Mr.
Rea said. "When you're drinking Canadian Club, you're showing people you
drink a better brand" of whiskey. He and Mr. Wondrich also said Betty Draper
's taste for Tom Collinses and vodka gimlets was spot on.

Thirsts on "Mad Men" have not slackened in Season 3. Draper will vary his
rye intake with Old Overholt, while Roger Sterling, Draper's boss and the
show's resident booze philosopher, broadens his palate. About Sterling's
beloved vodka (bottles of Smirnoff made frequent cameos in earlier episodes)
Mr. Rea said, "Martinis were the big thing in those days. Vodka was just
beginning to come on strong."

This season, Sterling gets his hands on some prized contraband: Soviet-made
Stolichnaya (then not available in the United States). His priorities remain
solidly in place. "Help yourself," he tells a colleague. "Not the Stoli."


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