In the mid 1980s, shoulder-padded hoards clamoured for aperitifs Cinzano and Dubonnet at upscale Vancouver bars. By the end of the decade, ordering specific wines by the glass became all the rage.

Shangri-La Hotel lead bartender Jay Jones was just a kid in the years scored by synthesizer-laden pop, but he says trends trickled then as they do now from our neighbours to the south, with liqueurs and juices flavouring vodka-based drinks.

"Cocktails stopped tasting like booze and more like candy," he says. "The wine cooler came into popularity to deprive our drinking of character whatsoever."

By the time the Tom Cruise blockbuster Cocktail hit screens in 1988, Jones says "flair" bartending was poised to burst onto the local scene. "It was fitting, as the cocktails had no substance and bartenders turned to visual entertainment to distract patrons from their soulless drinks," he says.

But Jones admits the flashy flick with Cruise juggling shakers and women inspired his interest in the occupation. "Any bartender that's in my generation that denies that that movie made an impact on them is lying through their teeth," says the 35-year-old.

By the 1990s, "bastardizations" of the original martini with chocolatinis and lycheetinis were in full swing. Sex and the City turned women onto Cosmopolitans, with local palates eventually tiring of "flat-flavoured sugary stuff in V-shaped glasses," according to Jones, who's bartended for more than a decade.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bartenders at high-end restaurants upped the ante and started pinching ingredients from their celebrity chefs. They smashed up fresh fruits and eventually used them to enhance, not mask, a boozy base. These trends have earned Vancouver a reputation as a premiere cocktail destination with the "Olympics for bartenders" about to descend on the city.

Tales of the Cocktail on Tour Vancouver, an offshoot of a nine-year-old festival from New Orleans, arrives in town March 13 to 15. Vancouver is the first city to be chosen for a satellite event, which festival-partner Jones says confirms the vibrance of the local cocktail scene.

Tales of the Cocktail started with a media dinner and walking tour of the Big Easy's historic bars and restaurants. New Orleans native and marketing specialist Ann Tuennerman organized both, then launched Tales of the Cocktail in 2003.

Dubbed North America's premier cocktail festival, Tales draws top bartenders and mixologists for five days of cocktails, cuisine and culture every July. For 2011, organizers wanted to give another city a taste. They consulted writers, bartenders and spirit companies who pointed to Vancouver. While some cities are only now seeing bartenders becoming interested in the history of the craft and putting new spins on drinks, "the folks in Vancouver, they've been onto this for a while," says Paul Tuennerman, chief business officer at Tales of the Cocktail (and Ann's husband).

Tour participants will visit 16 establishments including MARKET by Jean-Georges, Pourhouse and Boneta during the B.C. Bar Crawl. Seminars include "the history and importance of ice in cocktails," "the birth, death and rebirth of Canadian whisky" and the quintessentially Canadian cocktail, the Caesar.

Tuennerman believes the move from crafting cocktails toward bottled mixes and now to fresh ingredients parallels the rise and fall of convenience foods.

"Not to take anything away from the individual who created the bar gun, but have you ever had a good drink out of one of those?" he says. "That was like the boil in a bag and the microwave and cans. Now you've got restaurants... that don't even have freezers. They go out and buy everything that they're going to serve for dinner tonight, today."

Tuennerman says the resurgence of the cocktail was well under way before Mad Men hit TV screens. But the 1960s-era drama about libation-loving New York City ad executives likely expanded interest in old-school cocktails.

"You think about that person, their habit of going to a bar and asking for a glass of chardonnay and then after watching Mad Men, they realize that there was something else going on behind the bar."

Jones pulls a bottle of Plymouth gin up and away from his stainless steel jigger to shape a graceful arc of liquid. He shakes the juniper berry-flavoured spirit with fresh lemon juice, French apricot liqueur, ice and orange bitters and pours the strained potion into a coupe, a stemmed, wide, shallow glass. He tops the tangerine-hued concoction with cava and pops a brandied cherry into his twist on the century-old French 75.

His deliberate movements reveal the dark tattoos that trail to his thumbs from his crisp, pinstriped cuffs and black suit jacket. The dark-haired bartender with a horseshoe moustache and soul patch lays a napkin on MARKET's sleek black bar, sets the drink down, then uses his peripheral vision to gauge its recipient's reaction.

It was a vodka-based concoction that first garnered Jones media attention in 2002 when he worked at Ouest, now West. His China Girl, named for the David Bowie song, combined lychee liqueur, fresh pureed honeydew melon and lemon with vodka.

It was flavourful, but you couldn't taste the booze, and soon he started experimenting with the whiskies and cognacs his dad savoured.

Jones says Vancouver's cocktail scene started changing in the late '90s and early 2000s when he, Chris Stearns at Lumiere and Jamie Boudreau of Blue Water Café began concocting creative cocktails. They muddled fresh ingredients and reintroduced old-fashioned recipes. Jones was head bartender at Nu when it opened in 2005 and Nick Devine, now of The Cascade Room and Habit, was at George Lounge, and they amplified the local cocktail scene. That's when local drink lists started classifying cocktails as classic and contemporary.

They were often written up as mixologists, but Jones prefers the less pretentious title of bartender. He and other classicists are reclaiming the former glory of the title bestowed on professionals passionate about their craft. He co-founded the Canadian Professional Bartenders Association last year and, like others, says Vancouver's scene is marked by camaraderie.

Jones's bible is red with a tattered black binding. It's The Joy of Mixology, a book heavy on history that Stearns introduced him to in 2003. It outlines where specific drinks were invented, the social conditions of the time and why a certain spirit or ingredient was used. The knowledge gives each concoction "substance," Jones says. "Not just for us, but when you're serving it and you describe these things, suddenly you're romancing this drink and it becomes a personal connection for the guest."

But making certain classics has long been a problem for B.C. bartenders unable to get their hands on essential products because the liquor board doesn't stock them.

"It makes you very resourceful," Jones says. "You end up bringing bottles back on your trips... Peychaud's bitters, which is hugely important to a bartender's arsenal, we can't buy it in Vancouver... You end up substituting something just to try to figure out how to create the flavour profile you want. It may not be the most ideal way, but it certainly built up a lot of creativity in Vancouver, in particular with the ambitious bartenders."

Jones loves to craft a drink around the characteristics of a particular spirit, say a bourbon with its notes of spice, caramel and oak, and to satisfy an individual drinker's taste, using classic drinks such as French 75 or the Boulevardier's balance of rye, Campari and sweet vermouth as "points of departure."

February's issue of enRoute magazine showcased London, England's cocktail scene, where mixologists are serving potions mixed with juiced vegetables, topped with scented smoke and served in toothpaste tubes. So while Jones boosts the local scene, major cities like London "serve as huge inspiration for ambitious little cities like Vancouver."

Lauren Mote demanded full control of the bar concept at The Refinery when she was hired in 2008. "If you have an idea that's way off in left field you can probably make it happen in New York or any of those big cities," says the six-foot tall Toronto transplant. "In Vancouver we have limitations with the liquor board, limitations in terms of population."

The self-taught food scientist, who's bartended for more than a decade, has been honing "avant garde mixology" and formulating her own bitters, or liquor flavoured with herbs and roots, to add new dimensions to drinks and set The Refinery apart from the rest of the Granville Street scene. The Refinery makes vermouths, tinctures, tea syrups, salts, vegetable and fruit waters.

Canning jars of steeping mixtures of alcohol, seeds, spices, fruits, teas and twigs fill wooden shelves that separate the restaurant's lounge from its dining room. The Refinery offers 200 contemporary cocktails made with 23 house-made bitters. The Delhi bitters smell like Indian cooking, the house bitters include cassia and magnolia bark, white pepper, cumin and fennel seeds, and there's a Chilliwack corn and vanilla bitters.

Mote moved here in 2007 and worked at Lumiere, where she deconstructed the flavours of crème brulee and made a drink that included advocaat egg liqueur, brandy, vanilla syrup and lemon with torched powered sugar on top that customers had to crack to drink. She deconstructed the tasting notes for pinot noir when she taught a course on molecular mixology at The Diamond. The Pinot Noir cocktail included homemade cherry brandy, a mushroom tincture for earthiness, spicy house bitters to mimic French oak, lemon juice and coconut black tea syrup for balance. "It didn't taste like a glass of pinot noir, but it tasted like all the tasting notes that are in a pinot noir," she says.

Mote launched The Cocktail Kitchen competition series at The Refinery last July. Each week a featured bartender crafts three cocktails and pairs them with three courses inspired by a specific country and a corresponding spirit--Central American fare and tequila, Indian food and gin, Russian and vodka--and diners score the drinks. The second round started March 2.

These days, Mote only mixes drinks during the Lab Rat sessions on Thursday nights when Refinery bartenders create custom cocktails for guests who choose from a list of unusual ingredients, such as plum and root beer bitters. A drink she mixed recently has become one of The Refinery's official offerings for the Tales of the Cocktail bar crawl because it was such a hit.

Many of The Refinery's cocktails incorporate tea, notes Mote. "I'm still trying to get cocktails to be good for you."

Dani Tatarin's concoctions at The Keefer Bar also include tea. She uses Chinese herbs from Chinatown in the apothecary-style bar's drinks. The 30-year-old's take on an Old Fashioned, the Bold Fashioned, blends bourbon, coconut gomme syrup, house bitters and lemon zest. The house bitters include astragalus root and yun zhi mushrooms, both used to boost the immune system, yuan zhi, a herb used as an expectorant, and jig u cao or Chinese prayer beads, which are thought to help heal broken bones, soothe the liver and eliminate toxins.

Tatarin has created tinctures, syrups, and an energy tonic with red ginseng, yun zhi mushroom tea with aloe and honey that's topped with soda water.

In the lead up to Tales of the Cocktail on Tour Vancouver, the stylish bleached blond who last May won the Giffard International Cocktail Competition in Angers, France, is offering Learn It, Drink It sessions on Tuesday nights. Customers pay to learn the history of select drinks and how to make them.

Paul Tuennerman doesn't mind waiting 10 minutes for a carefully crafted drink, but says bartenders shouldn't take themselves too seriously.

"Think about why you go to a bar. It's kind of that proverbial Cheers moment," he says. "Walking into a bar is very experiential. It's not just about the cocktail. I can tell you that I would much rather have a mediocre cocktail served by an outstanding bartender than a great cocktail served by a dick."

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crossi@vancourier.com