It is always a pleasure to meet someone passionate about their art. Gareth Wainwright, owner of The Landmark cocktail bar in Bryanston Shopping Centre, has the feverish intensity of a Vincent van Gogh - even before I can take out my notepad he is sketching a picture of South African cocktail history with great splashes of colour.Whenever history happens, there is often a cocktail mixed to preserve the essence of the moment . Winston Churchill, that wily old soak, changed the ratio of gin to vermouth in a martini from 1 to 1 to a parched 15 to 1, effectively doubling the strength of the drink. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, was a teetotaller - draw your own conclusions.When I rein Wainwright in, I ask why he called his bar The Landmark.''It resonated with landmarks of old Johannesburg - The Rand Club, Rissik Street Post Office, the Sunnyside Hotel . I love Joburg," he muses, hinting at the cocktail he is about to make.Once, "cocktail" referred to a horse or person of mixed breeding, but the first recorded use of the word with reference to a drink appears in The Farmer's Cabinet (US) in 1803, where it was observed to be ''excellent for the head".Ever since, US bartenders have coopted the cocktail as an American art form. In South Africa, cocktails can be traced to the French Huguenots. Arriving with their savoir faire but deprived of their native tipple, they invented cocktails with local ingredients that would have the added benefit of discouraging mosquitos.They used the lime-green bark of the fever tree, which is loaded with quinine. Caperitif - a bitter, white wine-based aperitif flavoured with herbs and fever tree quinine - was created and produced in the Cape by The Castle Brandy and Wine Company until it was bought out in 1917 when, sadly, Caperitif disappeared.But Wainwright has revived the Transvaal cocktail, a sip of South African history.THE TRANSVAAL60ml Bartenders gin30ml Caperitif2 dashes of orange bittersLots of iceStir until cold and diluted, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with orange or naartjie peel.Corner William Nicol and Ballyclare, 011-463-5081..