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Coca Champagne
Champagne Stock Syrup, 7 pints; Wine Coca, 1 pint; Sugar Color, 1 ounce; Tartaric Acid Solution, 1 ounce.
This is a fountain compounder's formula — a bulk syrup meant to be drawn an ounce or so at a time and finished with carbonated water. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reason is the second ingredient.
- Wine Coca is the problem"Wine Coca" in fountain and pharmacy manuals of this period meant a wine or fortified-wine tincture of coca leaf, carrying cocaine into solution. Coca leaf and its alkaloids are controlled substances in the United States and in most other jurisdictions, and no domestic version of this ingredient exists. A pint of it in seven pints of syrup is not a trace flavouring.
- No substitution is offeredLeaving the coca out does not leave you with this drink; it leaves you with sweetened champagne-flavour syrup. If a champagne-style fountain syrup is wanted, work from a current formula rather than adapting this one.
- "Champagne" here is a flavour, not wineChampagne Stock Syrup was a proprietary or shop-made compound, generally simple syrup carrying an essence in which citrus, cognac oil and ester-type fruit notes commonly figured, intended to suggest sparkling wine once charged with gas. Published formulas varied, and the name tells you nothing about alcohol content.
- Sugar ColorCaramel colour: sugar cooked to near-burnt and dissolved in water, used purely to give the syrup a wine tint. One ounce in a gallon is a colouring dose, not a flavouring one.
- Tartaric Acid Solution is undefinedFountain books assumed a house stock solution of some stated strength, but no strength is given here, and published solutions varied. Any figure a modern reader supplies is a guess, and the acid dose is what balances the sweetness.
- Scale and intended serviceThe batch makes roughly a gallon of finished syrup — on the order of 130 one-ounce draws, if an ounce was the measure, charged with carbonated water at the tap. Nothing in the original is sized for a household.
Coca-flavoured drinks were mainstream commerce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Angelo Mariani's coca-infused wine, marketed from the 1860s, was widely imitated, and American soda fountains sold coca syrups and coca wines both as refreshment and as a tonic for fatigue. Fountain manuals of this kind were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter, and they listed coca preparations alongside vanilla and sarsaparilla with no more ceremony than any other stock syrup. "Champagne" was one of a family of fountain flavours — champagne, claret, sherry — that borrowed the prestige of wine without the licence, and pairing it with wine coca gave the drink a double claim to sophistication. The regulatory turn came with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which forced disclosure, and the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which brought coca under federal control; formulas like this one survive in print mainly as evidence of how ordinary they once seemed.