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Christine Sismondo and her Bottle Collection

We all know that so much more goes into making a bar experience great than what’s in the glass. If we zoom out we can see that what makes the service industry is so much more than the people making your drinks and dropping them at your table. There are collectors and (grumble) influencers and photographers and like our focus for this piece: writers.

Christine Sismondo has taken part in some aspect of bar culture for just over three decades. From bartending at a now closed Habs bar (look it up) to visiting historically important taverns and writing several books about the history of specific cocktails, the history of taverns and bars and how they shaped society in North America and even a deep dive into more than 100 Canadian distilleries. Christine resides in Toronto and is involved in the industry through a number of endeavours including being the 50 Best Bars Academy Chair for Canada East.

While filling up her resume, she has also filled her pantry…and a percentage of her basement, with an impressive collection of spirits from all over the world.

We took advantage of an invitation to her house to ask her about her life in bars and about the spirits that stick out in her collection.

Bartender Atlas: Do you remember the first time you had a drink in a bar?
Christine Sismondo: Yes.

BA: What did you have?
CS: I had an Amaretto Sour.

BA: And where were you?
CS: In Hull (Quebec, Canada). Yeah, I think I think that would be the very first.

BA: Is this one of those Ontarians crossing a border or Americans crossing a border because you have both citizenships, right?
CS: Yes, but no, I was living in Ottawa. We would walk across the bridge and we would go to bars. We still weren’t legal age, but they didn’t care. They were a little more lax. Yeah, I think we were 15 or 16 and the legal age was 18 and nobody said anything.

BA: When did you start working in bars?
CS: I started working in a licensed establishment when I was not quite legal age to handle alcohol so I lied about my age. I was 17. I worked as a hostess at a bagel shop that did serve alcohol before that, but I wasn’t handling alcohol. I did turn 18 pretty quickly after that.

BA: What was your longest tenured bartending gig?
CS: Oh, that would be Kilgour’s. Yeah, that’s a bar on Bloor Street (in Toronto) that’s no longer there.

BA: How would you describe Kilgour’s while you were working there? If someone said, hey, what’s Kilgour’s about?
CS: I’d say it’s a really, really great place with terrible alcohol. Service: good, music: good. And not much atmosphere.

BA: So there are tons and tons of jokes about writers and bars and drinking and you’ve made a career of writing about the history of bars and cocktails and spirits and drinking. If you weren’t writing about bars and liquor etc. what do you think you’d be writing about?
CS: I think that I already do a little bit. I write about things that are outside of that, but I guess where I really wish that I had done more work when I was younger was to study science to become a science writer. I think every time I see an article that I love these days, it’s a really good piece of science writing.

BA: One of your books, America Walks Into a Bar, is required reading for anyone looking to learn about the historical importance of bars on this side of the Atlantic. Can you talk a little bit about how you managed to research all these historically significant taverns in the USA?
CS: That’s nice of you to say it’s mandatory. Al is my husband and he was a baseball writer at the time and so I used to sort of tag along as much as I possibly could when he traveled for work because we’re talking about free hotel rooms in places like Boston and New York and other American League cities that we would go to all the time. In the daytime when he would go off to the ballpark and for most of the evening until he was done filing his story, I would just be out sort of scouting the bars that we’re going to go to at midnight when he finally got back from Yankee stadium.

BA: In all those baseball towns, are there any bars or cities that really stick out as the best or the worst or the most unique?
CS: I had the most fun in Baltimore of anywhere, several times. I remember one time it was a Sunday afternoon and I went to this tiny little bar in Fells Point. And it was mostly older people at the bar there. I had a few drinks and I was reading something but got talking to people, especially the bartender. And at the end of her shift, she took me over to the bar next door where there was a band playing that she really liked. And then I met people there. It felt like it was just the city where you could go to a bar and connect with people immediately. Baltimore is so friendly.

BA: You’re a doctor, correct?
CS: I’m not, like, a heart surgeon.

BA: Your doctoral paper was written about gay bars in Toronto from 1940ish to 1980ish, right?
CS: Yep.

BA: And recently that paper was adapted to podcast form called Mother Goose.
CS: Yeah, although I was listening to a really good podcast yesterday and the podcaster said I prefer to call it “audio documentary” and I think that makes so much sense.

BA: Can you tell us about the process of writing for a podcast versus writing for a book or an article or a column. How is it different writing for both those things and what’s the process of transcribing from one to the other?
CS: I think it’s really counterintuitive for a writer. I mean, when you write stuff that people are going to read, you’re looking at sentence variety. And so you want long, complex sentences to draw out a complicated thought followed by short sentences that underscore the point. That’s just not feasible in an audio documentary or in the oral form. You have to keep things so tight and so short and you can’t really have clauses or inserts or brackets or anything like that in the way. I think that’s the number one challenge for me is just that.

BA: Could you tell us a little bit about your bottle collection?
CS: Oh yeah, the bottles.

BA: How many bottles do you have?
CS: I have no idea.

BA: How do you have it organized?
CS: I try to keep all of my closed bottles in the basement. I actually have about the same amount as we can see in those photos again downstairs and most of those are completely unopened. Sometimes I put something that I don’t really want to just drink at the end of the night down there too. I’ll put a few special treasures down there.

Then with the upstairs stuff I tend to organize things by sort of category and geography a little bit. My top shelf has Canadian Whisky, American Whiskey, Irish Whiskey and Scottish Whisky and then below that, I’ve got, well, this is sort of where it gets messy. Sometimes the shelves aren’t tall enough for the tall things, right?

I have my tequila split actually on three different shelves because I’ve got the super tall bottles, then the short stubbies and then the medium-sized ones on two or three entirely different shelves but I try to keep them kind of close to each other vertically. Then tropical stuff is in one area – Pisco, Rum and all that, but I try to separate things unless I only have one bottle of a category like, say, Aguardiente. Then it gets lumped in with stuff.

BA: There is a reserve section for what you have. Have you tasted those before, or is this going to be a surprise when you open them?
CS: Everything that’s downstairs in my basement, some of it will be a surprise and some of them are duplicates. There are definitely some things down there that I’ve picked up on travels and never tried that I would like to.

BA: What do you do with the bottles that are gifted to you or that you’re been sent to review that you are not at all interested in drinking?
CS: I used to have a relative who was about 19 or 20 years old who lived around the corner from me and I used to call him up every once in a while and say, I have garbage booze. Most of that is really leftovers from recipe creation that I have too much of. And he would take it away. The other thing that I try to do with almost anything that is not synthetic is I use it for cooking. If there’s a bottle of wine or brandy that I don’t really like on its own, it’s going to become a gravy or sauce.

BA: Despite years and years of tasting spirits and being hired to be a judge on spirits panels and cocktails and whatnot, is there a spirit that you still gravitate towards? One that really calls you?
CS: It’s Pisco. Anything that’s kind of along those lines. An un-aged fruit spirit that’s high quality. That is always going to be my first pick unless you include fortified wines in the category.

BA: Could you, and I know this could be broad, tell us about how you taste a spirit or fortified wine? What are you looking for to call something “good” or “less interesting” or whatever it is? How do you judge what something is as far as quality is concerned versus favourite?
CS: I am not a technical taster at all. I am all about: I know what tastes good. And I know that I know what tastes good, because I almost never hand something to somebody and say, try this and they’re like “ew”. (Unless it’s something really esoteric or challenging like a high-ester rum or a bone-dry fino.) So I know that I have good taste, but I am not trained in that technical tasting thing, even though I’ve tried to get better and develop it over the years. I follow my heart.

BA: Are there any current writing projects that you have on the go that we should keep an eye out for?
CS: I’m doing a roadmap to psychedelics in Canada right now.

BA: And last question. If you and I are just hanging out. What can I get you?
CS: Fino sherry.

BA: Christine, tell us about this bottle that you’re holding in your hand.
CS:
I got it in China when we went to the Baijiu distillery at the end of a big international spirit judging competition. We were judging all sorts of different spirits but we were also definitely judging a fair quantity of Baijiu. It was involved in every day’s tasting. At the beginning of my whole experience in China I was very open to the esoteric flavor profiles in Chinese Baijiu. By the end of it I was no longer open to it. Hahaha!

When you go to the Moutai distillery – which is this huge complex – they’re much like Patron Tequila in that they build-out and reproduce (their distilling set-up) instead of just scaling up. So they have what seems like hundreds of pits where they’re fermenting sorghum. And so all you can smell in the air for miles is fermented sorghum. They gave me this.

BA: Your face is on a bottle!
CS: Yeah. That’s great!

BA: Christine, tell us about the Balvenie Double Oak 25

CS: I got this in 2019, I think. So I’m very good at saving things. I would definitely pass the marshmallow test.

Anyhow, what happened is I landed in Aberdeen and they picked me up and we went right to the river and we started drinking whiskey. I knew that we were going on a canoe trip because they had said “have a jacket and good footwear” and I thought: “How bad a canoe trip can it be?” There are canoe trips and then there are: canoe trips.

I was the only one who had ever been in a canoe before but I haven’t been in a canoe in a really long time. Also I did not understand this but the River Spey has serious rapids. So, um, we capsized but only after I had this heroic save where I righted the canoe by slamming my hand down on a rock in the river. The guy who runs the company said I’ve really never seen anyone do that. That was on the first rapids. For the second rapids, I’m going into it like I’m king of the world, but no, I couldn’t handle it.

I didn’t have a helmet on and I definitely should have had a helmet on, and I started just floating head-first downstream and I remembered that the guy had said, ‘If you do capsize try to make sure you go down foot first’ and I’m like ‘Okay that’s not good”. The second thing he said was you should try to remember to hold on to the oar and I asked him “why? Will it help me get over to the side of the river?” and he said “No, it’s because it costs 90 quid”.

 

 

BA: Tell us about the Waterford. Is it named after the Commander from the Handmaid’s Tale?

CS: That’s a good idea, but no, it’s like Waterford Crystal, which used to come from Waterford, Ireland. I think they make the glasses in Poland these days. The whisky is made in Waterford Ireland, although I don’t know if it’s going to be anymore, because I believe that they just filed for like bankruptcy protection or something like that.

It’s just this beautiful concept of a distillery where they chose the location, in part, because they could get a maltster who had the ability to store and malt every single grain from different farms separately so that they could make absolute single grain, single farm, single malt whisky in Ireland.

The whole idea is to put the barley at the centre of the experience and show that there is terroir and spirits. And I think they did a successful, a very successful, job.


This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Posted January 5th, 2025