No. 3710

How to Freeze Champagne

Maniere de Frapper le Champagne

In order to freeze champagne pounded ice and rock salt are generally used. Have a pail made of galvanized sheet iron or of wood, but the iron one is preferable, for the wine cools quicker in it. Put the bottle into a pail thirteen inches deep, seven and a half inches in diameter at the bottom and nine inches at the top; this pail must be furnished with a handle. Make a mixture of three pounds of finely pounded ice with a pound and a half of rock salt, not too coarse; fill the pail to the top, mix well together and turn the bottle by the neck to give it a backward and forward movement from right to left. If the champagne be taken from the ice-box where it has been lying for several hours, then it will only take twelve to fourteen minutes to freeze, but if it has not been previously on ice, then it will require fifteen to eighteen minutes for the operation. Champagne can be frozen without turning it around by leaving it in the salted ice for half an hour before serving. Machines are sometimes used which simplify the work greatly; the same time is required, only the labor is less fatiguing. When finished serve in a metal silver-plated pail with salted ice around. These are to be placed either on the table or on a small side table.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a bar procedure rather than a dish: a salted-ice bath that brings a bottle of champagne to the slushy, heavily chilled state the Gilded Age called frappé. The proportions are the useful part, and they still work.

The ratio is what mattersThree pounds crushed ice to one and a half pounds rock salt is a 2:1 ratio by weight, and that is the hinge of the whole thing. Salt depresses the melting point of the brine well below 32F, far below what plain ice can manage, which is why the bottle chills in minutes rather than hours.
Do not let it actually freeze solid"Frapper" here means chilled to the point of a faint slush, not frozen through. A sealed sparkling wine bottle holds around 90 psi at room temperature; ice expanding inside it will push the cork or split the glass. Pull the bottle while the wine still moves freely.
The pailThirteen inches deep, seven and a half inches across at the bottom and nine at the top: a tall, tapered bucket, filled to the top with the brine around the bottle. Any deep metal bucket of similar proportions does the job; galvanized iron was preferred because the wine cools quicker in it, and stainless is a reasonable substitute.
Turning the bottleThe back-and-forth rotation is not decorative. It keeps the chilled wine at the glass wall moving into the middle of the bottle, and roughly halves the time. Left still, the book allows half an hour, which is about right.
Rock salt, not table saltThe book asks for rock salt "not too coarse." Ice-cream salt is the usual modern equivalent; the common explanation is that it dissolves at roughly the rate the ice melts, giving a steady brine, where fine table salt dissolves too fast at the top.
"Machines"The book does not say what machines it means, only that they reduce the labor while taking the same time. A countertop bottle chiller or simply a longer soak replaces it.
Modern serving temperatureContemporary practice for non-vintage champagne is 43 to 47F, noticeably warmer than a frappé. Very cold wine mutes aroma and flattens the mousse, which mattered less when the wine was sweeter.
YieldOne 750 ml bottle serves six flutes. The salted ice bath will chill a second bottle if you refresh the ice and salt.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the house's practice, wine service included. Frozen or frappé champagne was a fashion of the period: the champagne shipped to America in the second half of the nineteenth century was generally sweet, styled for the American and Russian trade rather than the drier brut that later took over, and hard chilling suited it. That a great restaurant devoted a numbered entry to bucket dimensions and salt weights says something about how service was organized before mechanical refrigeration, when a house bought lake or river ice by the ton and a waiter's skill included knowing how long a bottle needed in brine. The salt-and-ice method itself long predates the recipe; it is the same chemistry that had been used for freezing creams and ices since the seventeenth century.