Ann Tuennerman is Mrs. Cocktail. She created Tales of the Cocktail in 2002, and the event has grown bigger ever since!
Take summer in New Orleans—please! It’s the doldrums for the New Orleans tourist industry. The hospitality capital of the world sits dead in the superheated water that passes for atmosphere on Royal Street in the middle of July. If you wait long enough, you might see a vacationing family or two perambulating in slow-motion through Jackson Square.
In comes Mrs. Cocktail, Ann Tuennerman. To the delight of the hospitality industry, she turns those least hospitable of days into the time for the world to come to the city for Tales of the Cocktail—an event she started in 2002 that attracted 28,000 participants last July on its 10th anniversary. Now, in between the dizzying array of seminars, presentations, product tastings and parties that make up Tales of the Cocktail, you might see a gang of tattooed Brooklyn hipster bartenders, representatives of a 400-year-old Irish distillery or a brand ambassador from Johannesburg or Tokyo defying the heat by taking a guided tour of the French Quarter’s historic cocktail bars.
Ann’s a local girl, raised in New Orleans East. “I’m actually public-school educated—I went to Livingston and Abramson. I am very proud of that these days. Then, I graduated in marketing from UNO.” She adds, “I believe it doesn’t matter where you are—you can get an education if you really want to.”
Her interest in advertising and marketing (“I never met a math class I liked.”) led to jobs at advertising agencies and eventually to doing promotions for radio and television stations. Her last stop before Tales was at WVUE Fox 8, where she met people in the hospitality industry when distillers like Seagram’s and Jack Daniels began placing television ads in the 1990s.
Tales of the Cocktail was spun off an entrepreneurial activity Ann started on the side. While not a licensed tour guide, she was inspired by author and photographer Kerri McCaffety’s book, Obituary Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans, to develop a walking tour of New Orleans bars and restaurants, hiring guides to conduct the tours. Southern Comfort, a product born in New Orleans in the 1870s, sponsored the tour. The brand, she says, didn’t control the tour, but guides worked its story in while presenting the city’s history.
“Being in promotion, I realized that if you start a tour, it doesn’t mean you’ll have people there. You can never recoup the revenue lost every day that no one comes. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the tour, I came up with the idea of Tales of the Cocktail. My husband [Mr. Cocktail, Paul Tuennerman] likes to say we had two events that year—opening and closing.”
The first Tales of the Cocktail had a small group of cocktail lovers sipping and talking about all things spirits. Southern Comfort sponsored Tales the first few years. Its leaving, followed by Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, made for some tough times, with Ann going into debt self-financing Tales. However, more and more manufacturers caught on as the event continued, and it grew about 10 percent each year. It is now the world’s premier cocktail festival, serving as the annual meeting place for the international cocktail community.
Tales of the Cocktail on Tour debuted in 2011, with a Canadian taste of Tales in Vancouver, B.C. In 2013, a stop in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was added. “We really are a global brand, and we wanted to take it on the road to reinforce that. It works. We always had a contingent of Canadians at Tales, but after the Vancouver event, we could really see it increase.”
Preserving a Valued Culture
Tales of the Cocktail is like Jazz Fest for the alcoholic-beverage world in more ways than one. Lost in all of the celebrities and music and food and crowds of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is the fact that it simply started as, and remains, the major fundraiser for the Jazz and Heritage Foundation. What shouldn’t be lost in all the parties, presentations and dinners of Tales of the Cocktail is that, while it didn’t begin with that purpose, Tales is the primary fundraising event for The New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society, which funds a minimum of $25,000 a year in scholarships and grants. Founded by Ann and Paul in 2006, the non-profit NOCCPS seeks to preserve the rich history of cuisine and cocktails in New Orleans and around the world by supporting those in the hospitality and cocktail industries.
The cultural preservation efforts are apparent in the society’s Sazerac Seal of Approval program, which strives to preserve the quality of New Orleans’ most legendary cocktail by recognizing establishments around the world that adhere to the highest standards for their Sazeracs. Another program, which involved selling bar towels at Tales events, benefitted the employees of P&J Oyster Co., a French Quarter institution whose existence was put in jeopardy by the 2010 BP oil spill.
Ann says, “At our core, we are a non-profit event benefiting a trade. We raise money and give out various scholarships during the year, mostly for educational programs for bartenders. They apply for something they want to learn more about, and we fund it. We also have our Cocktail Apprentice program.” Through the apprentice program, a team of 50 young bar professionals are chosen to spend the Tales week preparing thousands of batched cocktails for seminars and tastings. The program helps raise the standards of the industry as a whole by pairing the next generation of hospitality managers with top names in the field as they prepare those presenters’ offerings; the apprentices’ hotel stay and meals are provided by NOCCPS.
Through internships and volunteer programs, Ann and the NOCCPS are also helping to introduce many young students and recent grads into the business world. “I have a great core team, the Cocktail Angels [Michelle Dunnick, Melissa Young, and Christina Sudderth], and this will be their sixth Tales. We have a lot of other great staff people, too. Every year, there are about 12-14 interns and 60-70 seasonal staff who work the week before and the week of the event. Believe it or not, we hire many teachers and bartenders from all over the country for those two weeks. We try to have 70-80 percent returning staff, because they know what to do right off the bat. We also hire people who have volunteered.”
Developing young talent is important to Ann. She says, “The industry people have relationships with the other team members in addition to me, and that’s something I always want to promote. We consistently take interns to meetings and always introduce them; team members lead conference calls and get exposure so that the people we work with will have confidence in every member of the team.”
For Ann, loving what you do means it never stops. “I’m always thinking about Tales. I go home and send out emails and thoughts and do a lot of social media, because I enjoy the people I get to work with—not only here, but with the bartenders, presenters, moderators and sponsors all over the world. They’re all really nice people.”
Developing more local participation is something Ann and the team are trying to accomplish, and she’d like to get the word out. “One of my goals this year for New Orleans is to try to get even more people involved. Whether you’re a host at a restaurant, a sous chef or a banquet manager, you can get something out of Tales of the Cocktail.”
On July 17-21, Tales offers seminars and tasting rooms where spirits experts from around the world share what’s now and what’s next for cocktails. Then, the night comes alive in true New Orleans fashion with dinner pairings, parties, competitions and more. For event information, visit TalesoftheCocktail.com.
The post Mrs. Cocktail: Tales of the Cocktail’s Ann Tuennerman appeared first on Inside Northside Magazine Online.