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Vienna
Juice of 1 lemon, 1 teaspoonful powdered sugar, ½ ounce lemon syrup. Mix juice, sugar and syrup in a shaker, fill 8-ounce glass to within ½ inch of top with plain water and shaved ice, pour in shaker, shake, strain, filling glass to within ½ inch of top. Then carefully pour enough blackberry wine down the side of the glass to fill. Do not stir. Top with slice of orange and serve with straws.
A fountain lemonade with a wine float, built in the glass so the layers stay separate. Nearly everything here is straightforward; the one thing that decides whether it looks right is the pour at the end.
- The float is the whole pointThe blackberry wine goes down the inside of the glass slowly, over the back of a spoon if that helps, and nothing is stirred afterward. Poured straight in or agitated, it disperses and you have a muddy pink lemonade instead of the intended two-tone glass.
- Half an ounceOne tablespoon of lemon syrup. The wine is unmeasured by design — it is whatever fills the last half inch, roughly an ounce in an 8-ounce glass.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with lemon oil and citric acid, sweeter and more perfumed than fresh juice. Bottled lemon syrup or a strong homemade simple syrup infused with lemon zest both stand in; skip anything labeled lemonade concentrate, which is mostly diluted juice.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this generally meant finely ground sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves without clouding the drink.
- Shaved iceShaved rather than cubed ice was standard at the fountain because it chills fast and gives the drink body. Cubes work but shake harder and expect a thinner result; either way strain the shaken mixture back into the glass as directed.
- Blackberry wineSweet fruit wines were fountain staples in the period, and some products sold as blackberry wine for soda use appear to have been low- or non-alcoholic cordials. A modern sweet blackberry wine, a creme de mure thinned with water, or a thick blackberry syrup will all float.
- YieldOne 8-ounce glass. Scaling up is fine for the lemon base, but float each glass individually — layered drinks do not survive being poured from a pitcher.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried hundreds of drinks named for cities, hotels, colleges and public figures, and the names rarely described the contents; "Vienna" here signals nothing Austrian, only that the dispenser needed a label for a lemonade finished with a wine float. Fruit wines and cordials — blackberry above all — were a fixture of the American fountain and the American medicine chest alike, blackberry cordial having long been sold as a household remedy for summer complaint before it settled into service as a sweetener and coloring agent. The technique of pouring a heavier syrup or wine down the side of a filled glass, then forbidding the spoon, belongs to the same showmanship that produced the layered pousse-café behind the bar: the drink was meant to be looked at across the counter before it was drunk through the straws.