Wine & Drinks
The legend of Harvey Wallbanger
By JOHN MARIANI
Here's how the stories go. Believe what you want.
A Harvey Wallbanger, a cocktail made with vodka, orange juice, and Liquore Galliano.
Back in the late 1960s at Pancho's Bar in Manhattan Beach, California, they made a cocktail with vodka, orange juice, and Liquore Galliano, an Italian liqueur with a strong licorice flavor. It was basically a variation on the screwdriver, just with the addition of the Galliano.
One of the customers who liked it — a lot — was a local surfer named Harvey (some say he came up with the idea of spicing the screwdriver with Galliano), who, after losing a tournament one day, put away a lot more of the cocktails than he should have, causing him to bang against the wall as he exited the bar. It's a reasonable story, and a good one.
Galliano, the not-so-secret ingredient in the popular '70s drink the Harvey Wallbanger, dates back to 1896 when homesick Italians headed for the California gold rush.
But some say it was just a joke told by Don Riddell about the drink invented by Robert Pratt, his fellow bartender at the Arlberg Chalet in Mammoth Lake, California. Still others claim the drink was concocted by bartender Bill Doner at The Office bar in Newport Beach. Another version puts the date of creation back to 1952 courtesy of New York mixologist Donato "Duke" Antone.
Although there's not much support for the New York version, the time period is more accurate. By the late-1960s the drink was so well-established that it's said Harvey Wallbanger was the most popular write-in vote in the 1968 presidential election.
Dan Marcheano, owner of The Arches in Newport Beach, puts the advent of the Harvey Wallbanger in 1956. At the time, the venerable restaurant and bar was a hangout for the Hollywood crowd, who visited the nearby Balboa Bay Club.
"They'd come up here to eat and drink," says Marcheano, who bought the place in 1982. "John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe — they were all here."
The liqueur itself dates back to 1896. At the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of Southern Italians were immigrating to California's gold fields to seek their fortune. Arturo Vaccari, a young Italian distiller, created the new spirit for his countrymen to take with them on their journey as a souvenir of their homeland. He made the original blend from local Italian ingredients (anise, lavender, mint) and foreign spices (vanilla, cinnamon, coriander) and named the liqueur after Major Giuseppe Galliano, a reputedly handsome Italian hero of the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Vaccari's final Midas touch was to color the beverage gold, as a symbol of the gold rush that had inspired its creation.
After Foremost/McKesson took on the Liquore Galliano brand (it is now owned by Lucas Bols), yet another spirited version of events unfolded. In the early 1970s, two marketing guys named R.C. Foster and Steve Hanauer either came up with the cocktail idea and invented the Harvey character or appropriated both from the Pancho's bar story as a hook for their product.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the Harvey Wallbanger became very popular in the '70s and was even a featured cocktail on TWA flights. Foremost/McKesson went so far as to have a plastic blow-up doll of "Harvey" ride on airlines as a promotional gimmick. The cocktail has lost a good deal of its popularity since its heyday, but it's still a good drink, in part because Galliano is considered to be an ideal "marrying" ingredient as it deepens other flavors rather than being intrusive.
For your own "gold rush," here's how it goes — straight from The Arches: Pour 1½ ounces of vodka over ice, add 4 ounces of orange juice (preferably fresh-squeezed), and float or pour ½ ounce of Galliano over the top. "Serve it with a swizzle stick. It's meant to be drunk from the bottom up," advises Marcheano.
Issue: October 2009
