Boulevardier

Bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Campari — first published in McElhone's 1927 Paris bar manual, the Negroni's structure made autumnal by bourbon's grain and oak.

The Boulevardier was created by Erskine Gwynne, an American expatriate writer and socialite who published a Paris literary and social magazine called The Boulevardier from 1927 to 1932. Gwynne was part of the American expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s that also included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, and his magazine — which covered Parisian social life, arts, and gossip with a light, cosmopolitan touch — was a product of the same Jazz Age cultural ferment. The cocktail named for him was first published in Harry McElhone's Barflies and Cocktails (1927), one of the key Paris cocktail manuals of the Prohibition era. The recipe is structurally a Negroni with American whiskey replacing the gin: bourbon or rye, sweet vermouth, and Campari in equal parts, stirred and served over ice or in a coupe. The Negroni itself had emerged in Florence around 1919, so by 1927 the equal-parts bitter-spirit-sweet-vermouth formula was established. Where the Negroni's gin provides botanical crispness and the drink reads as clean and sharply bitter, the Boulevardier's whiskey — with its grain, caramel, and oak character — gives the same structure a warmer, fuller, more autumnal quality. The drink languished in relative obscurity for most of the 20th century until the craft cocktail revival of the 2000s elevated it to regular menu status, where it is now considered one of the essential American whiskey cocktails.