Home › Beverages › Sauterne Cup
Sauterne Cup
1 quart soda water 2 tablespoons Orange Curacoa 2 cups Sauterne wine 1/2 cup sugar (scant) Rind 1/2 orange Mint leaves Rind 1/2 lemon Few slice orange 12 strawberries Add Curacoa to rind of fruit and sugar; cover, and let stand two hours. Add Sauterne, strain, and stand on ice to chill. Add chilled soda water, mint leaves, slices of orange, and strawberries. The success of cups depends upon the addition of charged water just before serving.
A wine cup in the Edwardian sense: a chilled, lightly sweetened wine punch built in a pitcher and topped with soda at the last moment. The recipe is sound as written; the only real skill is timing the fizz.
- The hingeCharged water goes in as the cup goes to the table, not before. Soda added early flattens, and the drink loses the lift that distinguishes a cup from cold sangria.
- Soda waterA quart is 4 cups of plain carbonated water or seltzer, unflavoured and unsweetened. Club soda works; tonic does not, as the quinine and extra sugar fight the Sauterne.
- CuracoaOrange Curaçao, an orange-peel liqueur. Any dry or medium orange liqueur will do; two tablespoons is 1 fl oz.
- SauterneIn American books of this period "Sauterne" without the final s usually meant any sweetish white table wine rather than true Sauternes from Bordeaux. A modestly sweet Chenin Blanc, Riesling or inexpensive Sauternes-style white all suit; a bone-dry wine will need the full half cup of sugar.
- The macerationThe two-hour stand with sugar, citrus rind and liqueur works much like an oleo-saccharum: the sugar draws aromatic oil out of the peel. Pare the rind thinly with no white pith, which turns the cup bitter.
- StrainingStrain out the rind before chilling. Left in, the peel keeps giving and by serving time the drink tastes of marmalade.
- Sugar"Scant" half cup means just under 100 g. Taste after the Sauterne goes in and hold some back if the wine is already sweet.
- Mint and fruitBruise the mint lightly between the palms rather than muddling it, and halve or hull the strawberries so they release colour slowly. Both are garnish here, not flavouring.
- YieldAbout 6 cups of liquid, or eight small glasses. If you want ice in the pitcher, a single large piece dilutes less than cubes; the recipe itself only says to stand the mixture on ice to chill.
Wine "cups" were the well-mannered end of Anglo-American punch making: a bottle of something inexpensive stretched with soda, sweetened, perfumed with peel and liqueur, and set out at afternoon receptions, tennis parties and summer suppers where a cocktail would have been thought fast. Claret cup and cider cup appear in nineteenth-century household books alongside this white-wine version, and the formula barely varies -- fruit rind, sugar, a spoonful of liqueur, ice, mint, and charged water at the last second. The insistence on "Sauterne" rather than Sauternes reflects American labelling before appellation rules bit: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries domestic wineries, particularly in California, sold generic whites under borrowed European names, so the wine a reader of this book actually poured was probably grown a good deal closer to home than Bordeaux.