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Grape Juice Delight
Bruise several sprigs of mint in a glass and half fill with cracked ice. Pour in enough grape juice to fill the glass and decorate with sprigs of mint. Serve with straws.
A mint julep with the whiskey taken out, built the same way and in the same order. The only real technique is in the mint.
- Bruise, do not shredPress the mint against the side of the glass with a muddler or spoon handle just until it smells green. Bartenders have long held that tearing or pounding the leaves makes the drink bitter, and grape juice is too sweet to hide it.
- Cracked iceThis means ice broken into irregular chips, not cubes and not the fine snow of crushed ice. Wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin, or pulse briefly in a blender. Cracked ice chills fast while diluting more slowly than crushed.
- Which grape juiceThe bottled Concord juice of the period was pasteurized and comparatively sweet, closer to today's standard supermarket Welch's than to fresh-pressed juice. Unsweetened or cold-pressed juice makes a sharper, less syrupy drink; if using it, a bar spoon of simple syrup brings it closer to what the recipe assumes.
- Glass sizeThe recipe specifies only "a glass." Use a tall tumbler; half filled with ice, the juice needed will be somewhat less than half the glass's capacity, since it fills the gaps between the chips. One glass per person, and it does not scale into a pitcher well because the ice is structural.
- Acid is the missing elementStraight grape juice over ice reads flat. A squeeze of lemon, or half an ounce of lemon juice, sharpens it considerably without changing the character. This is an addition; the recipe as written calls for none.
- The garnish is functionalThe sprigs stuck in the top sit under the drinker's nose while the straws deliver the liquid. Slap the garnish sprigs once between the palms before planting them so they give off scent.
- Serve immediatelyOnce the ice begins to melt into the sweetened juice the drink quickly turns watery. Build it at the moment of serving.
This comes from a wave of American non-alcoholic drink books published as national prohibition approached, when bartenders, hostesses and hotel dining rooms all needed something to put in a tall glass. Bottled grape juice was the obvious substitute, and it had been commercially available since the later nineteenth century through the work of Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who applied pasteurization to grape juice to produce an unfermented communion wine. It gained a political edge in 1913, when Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a teetotaler, served grape juice rather than wine at an official dinner, an episode the press mocked for years as "grape juice diplomacy." The recipe here is transparently a julep template with the spirit removed, mint, cracked ice and straws intact, which is exactly what these books did over and over: keep the ritual and the glassware, change the liquid.