NEW ORLEANS, UNITED STATES - Ted Haigh was fascinated by Hollywood's portrayal of cocktail culture even when he was well shy of legal drinking age.

For Haigh, watching William Powell and his on-screen wife Myrna Loy sip from thin-stemmed glasses and exchange clever banter in the 1934 classic "The Thin Man" was intoxicating.

"I kept wondering, what are they drinking and what does it taste like?" said the 51-year-old.

Such images sparked a lifelong fascination with the history of drinking and brought Haigh to the opening of the Museum of the American Cocktail, where he is curator.

It's a clubby wood-and-glass space that pays tribute to one of America's favorite pastimes with displays of hundreds of cocktail artifacts that Haigh has amassed over several decades of collecting.

Vintage cocktail shakers, Prohibition-era newspapers, one-of-a-kind whiskey bottles and some of the oldest known bar tools and cocktail recipes in the country are among the exhibits.

"I used to want to just keep it all to myself, but then I realized I could do a lot more good by sharing it with the world," says Haigh, widely known by his online nickname, Dr. Cocktail.

Set inside the Riverwalk Marketplace retail center along the New Orleans riverfront, the cocktail museum is the brainchild of New York bartender Dale DeGroff and his wife, Jill.

Their idea was to populate the museum with Dale's extensive inventory of cocktail memorabilia. But after becoming acquainted with Haigh and seeing his rich collection, they persuaded him to lend his treasures to the new museum.

As to the locating the museum in New Orleans, DeGroff said he didn't have to think twice.

"This is the town where men and women sat together in barrooms in the 19th century, when that wasn't happening anywhere else in America," says DeGroff, who has tended bar at New York landmarks like the Rainbow Room. "That's because in New Orleans, the bars were called coffeehouses, which made it OK for ladies to enter."

New Orleans is a natural place for a monument to drinking.

The city is home to such classic cocktails as the Sazerac (recently designated the "official" cocktail of New Orleans by the Louisiana legislature), the Ramos Gin Fizz and the Brandy Milk Punch.

To emphasize the point, the opening coincided with the end of a five-day citywide "festival" of cocktail tastings and bartender seminars called "Tales of the Cocktail."

DeGroff said the cocktail museum will benefit from its association with its next-door neighbor, the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, a fledgling institution also designed to celebrate the region's gustatory prowess.

The cocktail museum's opening drew dozens of cocktail enthusiasts, including a few of New Orleans' best-known bartenders who no doubt arose earlier than usual to attend the mid-morning event.

"The museum tells the story of drinking, and drinking is an American story," said veteran bartender Chris McMillian, a founding member of the museum who pours and shakes at the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel.

Renowned for his Mint Juleps, McMillian is a font of cocktail lore and is quick to offer that rum was one of America's earliest "cash crops."

"The Pilgrims, you know, were originally headed for Virginia," he explained. "They only stopped in Massachusetts because they were running out of beer."

The Museum of the American Cocktail is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., on the second floor of Riverwalk Marketplace, 1 Julia St., New Orleans.

Web site: http://www.museumoftheamericancocktail.org