Eric Felten gives a surprisingly thorough run-down of James Bond’s drink selections in Martinis Only? Not James Bond:
Bond’s first drink on record occurs some 30 pages into Fleming’s debut novel, ‘Casino Royale.’ He strolls into a bar at a French resort hotel and orders … an Americano.A what? An Americano is made of Campari, sweet vermouth, and soda water over ice in a highball glass. One of my favorite cocktails, with its perfect balance of bitter and sweet, the Americano is admittedly an acquired taste. Yet it was so popular among Americans visiting Italy at the turn of the last century that it was named after them. Nowadays it is obscure enough to be a fair test of your favorite bartender’s skills.
Bond’s taste for Americanos is explained in the short story ‘From a View to a Kill,’ which starts with Bond licensed to kill time in Paris. ‘One cannot drink seriously in French cafes,’ Fleming writes. ‘Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin.’ Instead, one makes the best of the ‘musical comedy drinks’ appropriate to the venue, in which case ‘Bond always had the same thing — an Americano.’
Fleming knew that in drink no less than food, it pays to play to an establishment’s strength. When Bond grabs a roadhouse lunch with Felix Leiter in ‘Diamonds Are Forever,’ he doesn’t waste time elucidating the comparative virtues of shaking vs. stirring; he just orders a beer (a Miller High Life, at that).
When in Jamaica, 007 favors gin-and-tonics extra heavy on juice from the island’s fresh limes. When Bond trails Auric Goldfinger to Geneva, he relaxes with a tot of Enzian, “the firewater distilled from gentian,” the root of an Alpine wildflower. In the Athens airport he knocks back Ouzo; in Turkey it’s Raki. At Saratoga racetrack, he drinks Old-Fashioneds and “Bourbon and branch” (i.e., water). And when Bond goes out to lunch in London, he orders one of the most distinctively British of drinks, a Black Velvet. Equal parts champagne and Guinness stout, a Black Velvet might sound awful, but proves to be startlingly good in the drinking — I find it tastes curiously and deliciously like hard cider.
But 007 doesn’t always bow to local custom. In “Casino Royale” Bond for the first and only time invents a drink, a “special martini.” He specifies to the barman, “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?” Later, he names it a “Vesper,” for his doomed love-interest, fellow British agent Vesper Lynd. When he learns she’d been working for the Russkies, the cocktail is as dead to him as the girl.