Harvey Wallbanger
The Harvey Wallbanger is a cocktail of vodka, Galliano and orange juice, a variation on the screwdriver that became especially popular in the United States in the 1970s. Its story is tied to an advertising campaign designed to promote the Italian liqueur Galliano.
History
The drink dates to 1969, when McKesson Imports Company, the importer of Galliano, launched a marketing campaign for the liqueur. George Bednar, the company's marketing director, commissioned a cartoon character from graphic artist William J. "Bill" Young of Lima, New York. The character was a surfer who appeared in print advertisements from 1969 into the following decade, accompanied by a tagline Bednar said he had written: "Harvey Wallbanger is the name. And I can be made!" The ads gave a simple recipe: orange juice, vodka stirred with ice, and a float of Galliano.
The cocktail itself is credited to Donato "Duke" Antone, a three-time world champion mixologist from Hartford, Connecticut, who ran a bartending school there. It is unclear whether Antone created the drink to showcase Galliano or simply renamed an existing one. His grandson has suggested that the earlier version was known as "Duke's Screwdriver".
Culture
The name also found its way into baseball. The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers were nicknamed "Harvey's Wallbangers" in honour of their manager that season, Harvey Kuenn, and for their aggressive style of play. The drink stayed popular with Brewers fans for many years. Today the Harvey Wallbanger belongs to the classic cocktail repertoire of the 1970s and is served mainly at parties and as a relaxed brunch or dinner-party drink, with a lower profile than many of its contemporaries.
Legend and fact
A popular story holds that Antone invented the drink in 1952 and named it after a surfer who frequented his supposed Blackwatch Bar on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. This is implausible: at that time Antone was running a bartending school in Hartford, and there is no evidence that the bar existed. Spirits writer Robert Simonson considers the tale a fabrication, while historian David Wondrich regards the Harvey Wallbanger as the first successful cocktail created by a consultant.