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Make your Champagne really sparkle
By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published December 28, 2005
Yet Champagne is such a happy drink that it gives people funny ideas, like adding rum or cherries to a perfectly lovely wine.
Making cocktails with Champagne as if it were, say, a silly vermouth, strikes connoisseurs and winemakers as humbuggery. However spirited hosts and bartenders have used bubbly to put extra sparkle in mixed drinks for much of the 20th century.
And in the millennial convergence of noveltinis, Kelly's for Just about Anything in Dunedin includes a Sunshine 'Tini on its "martooni list." The barkeeps at the Chic-A-Boom Room make it with Bacardi O orange-flavored rum, Grand Marnier, orange juice and a float of well-brand bubbly on top.
The oldest Champagne drinks were simpler, perhaps because the creators saw a bottle of sparkling wine as a nifty ingredient. They didn't tinker too far, usually combining bubbly dynamics with a favorite flavor or beverage.
James Bond and less fictitious purists converted wine to cocktail simply with a sugar cube and a drop or two of angostura bitters in a flute. The French already mixed white wine with a splash of creme de cassis for a kir, and made it kir royale by swapping a lowly still wine for Champagne.
Other classics mix beverages more generously. Guinness partisans, who've added ginger ale and fruit syrup to their stout, have made black velvets of draught Guinness and Champagne for almost 150 years.
The bellini reportedly started at Harry's Bar in Venice, Italy, as a way to celebrate white peaches, not bubbly, and real peaches still make the drink (schnapps does not). The mimosas of Sunday brunch combine orange juice and sparkling wine in a similar fashion.
More exotic mixology dates to the French 75 created by Americans in France after World War I in honor of the potent 75mm French cannons lent to doughboys.
Its first formulation packed gin, Calvados apple brandy and, for a secret weapon, absinthe. Soon it became gin, Champagne, lemon and sugar. In a French 95, the firepower is magnified by replacing gin with bourbon; in a French 125, Champagne is paired with Cognac.
In the past two decades, a generation of bartenders with Baskin-Robbins flavors, Nickelodeon colors and Long Island Iced Tea power, have mixed sparkling wine with a candy box of flavors and a rainbow of liqueurs, flavored vodkas and more.
But is it wrong? Bubbly abuse to distort Champagne? The issue perplexes Hugh Davies, whose family revived fine American bubbly at Schramsberg in Napa, and was in Tampa this month to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the winery - and his birth.
"We think we've made a fine wine as it is. It doesn't need more," he said. Yet when he drinks a margarita he appreciates good quality in all the ingredients and calls for a top-shelf tequila. "So would a mimosa made with Schramsberg be better than a mimosa made with, who shall we pick on . . . Totts? Sure."
Still, Davies would be unlikely to sacrifice his best prestige reserve wines and vintages to a cocktail, perhaps the new less-than $20 Mirabelle.
So let's make a deal: We'll drink more Champagne and other sparklers all year long and drink them at dinner with food, not just special occasions.
But at a once-a-year party, we may make our cocktails bubble for an easy, different drink. Use a decent dry sparkler, not a super cheapie, chill the glasses and the wine, enjoy the pop but keep the foam down.
-- Chris Sherman can be reached at 727 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com
[Last modified December 27, 2005, 13:53:09]
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