Gary Regan

After being raised in British pubs, and being put to work as a bartender by his parents when he was just 14 years old, Gary Regan fled to New York City in 1973. For over two decades he tended bar at a variety of dives in Manhattan, and in 1990 he started to write about his favorite subjects: drinks and drinking. It wasn't long before he noticed that his work encouraged liquor companies to send him free bottles of booze. He quit the bar business immediately and started to write on a full-time basis. In 1991 his first book, The Bartender’s Bible, was published. After hoarding as many bottles of various and sundry spirits as possible Gary, together with his wife Mardee Haidin Regan, started to focus on bourbon, their whiskey of choice. After an exhaustive period of research that involved visiting every distillery in Kentucky as many times as possible, picking up free samples on every visit, the Regans wrote The Book of Bourbon and Other Fine American Whiskey in 1995 and, later, The Bourbon Companion, New Classic Cocktails, The Martini Companion, and The Joy of Mixology. Gary writes The Cocktailian, a bi-weekly column, for The San Francisco Chronicle. He has written regular columns in The Malt Advocate, Nation's Restaurant News, Cheers Magazine, and The Wine Enthusiast. His work is also published in magazines in the U.K., Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Gary also conducts Cocktails in the Country, a series of two-day bartender workshops in New York, for seven years, and which he now takes on the road. Gary and Mardee host www.ardentspirits.com, publish a free e-mail newsletter, Ardent Spirits, and maintain a Worldwide Bartender Database that serves to put spirits companies in touch with their most important ambassadors: The men and women who hold forth from behind slabs of mahogany all over the globe. Gary lives in a small village in the Hudson Valley, about 50 miles north of the Big Apple.