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Champagne Stock-Syrup
Rhine Wine, 3 pints; French Cognac, 4 ounces; Sherry Wine, 2 ounces; Simple Syrup, 5 pints.
This is a fountain formula rather than a set of instructions: four liquids in proportion, meant to be mixed cold and drawn by the ounce. Almost everything the modern reader needs is in what the book leaves unsaid.
- No cooking, no heatNothing here is to be boiled or reduced. Combine the wines, brandy and syrup cold and bottle; heating drives off the aromatics and the alcohol that carry the flavour.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthSoda-fountain simple syrup of this period was heavy, generally around 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, not the 1:1 syrup used in cocktails today. A thinner syrup will give a watery, sharply winey drink.
- YieldThe wine and syrup alone come to 8 pints, a gallon; with the 6 ounces of Cognac and sherry the formula makes a little over a gallon of stock syrup. Scale it down freely; the proportions are what matter.
- Rhine wineA white wine in the Rhine style. In American usage of the period this could be a German Riesling or a domestic wine sold under the same name, and it was not necessarily dry. A modern off-dry Riesling works; anything oaked or markedly sweet will throw the balance.
- "Champagne" is a flavour nameThere is no champagne in it. Fountain syrups were commonly named for the taste being suggested, and this one appears to aim at a dry, brandied character, with carbonated water supplying the bubbles at the moment of service.
- Dosage at the fountainStock syrups of this kind were drawn at roughly 1 to 1.5 ounces per glass, then filled with carbonated water and stirred once. Undiluted it is unpleasantly strong.
- It is not a soft drinkThe finished syrup runs somewhere near 5 to 6 percent alcohol, and a glass made from it lands under 1 percent. Small, but not nothing, and worth knowing before serving it to anyone who is avoiding alcohol.
- KeepingThe sugar concentration does most of the preserving work. Bottle full, cap tightly and keep cool and dark; the wine will oxidise and dull within a few weeks of opening.
Before Prohibition, American soda fountains kept shelves of "stock syrups" -- concentrated flavour bases, bought or compounded in the shop, that were drawn by the ounce and finished with carbonated water in front of the customer. Wine and brandy do appear in some of these formulas without special comment, and a dispenser's manual could treat Cognac much as it treated vanilla extract -- though the fountain also had strong associations with temperance, and practice varied from shop to shop and state to state. "Champagne" here belongs to a family of aspirational fountain names alongside claret, port and sherry syrups: the drink promised the idea of a fashionable wine cheaply, delivered dry rather than fruity, and got its sparkle from the carbonator rather than the bottle. Formulas of this type largely vanished from American fountain practice after 1920, and the syrup shelf that survived into the soda-jerk era was the sweet, fruit-and-cola one we now think of as normal.