champagne cocktails must be divided into two traditions: the Champagne Cocktail proper, where the wine is the main ingredient, and cocktails (and other mixed drinks) where champagne is a modifier or other component. See modifier.
The Champagne Cocktail
The first description of a Champagne Cocktail we have, with ice and bitters-saturated sugar, is from an American bar in Panama in 1855, around the time champagne was becoming the dry, fizzy drink we know today. (The recipe was published in 1862 by Jerry Thomas.) Its origins are obscure but may have something to do with the nature of champagne at the time: historically, frequent bad vintages had meant the wine was often hard and green. To make the champagne more attractive, winemakers added sugar, and until the 1840s, champagne was preferred sweet. If too sweet, it was best served almost frozen. The idea of a cocktail—spirits with sugar, bitters, and ice—with champagne in place of the spirits fit right in with those practices.
There is another factor. Bubbles are the primary characteristic of any Champagne Cocktail, but the distinctive fizz is a relatively recent development. Champagne was originally “brisk,” “delicate,” with a “prickling on the palate”; these bubbles gave champagne a unique selling feature to royalty and the rich. A gentle fizz was preferable to a frothy wine, an indication of too much sugar during vinification. However, as creating fine bubbles was mastered, they became important to the cocktail’s mouthfeel. Thomas’s instruction (1862) to shake the cocktail would re-energize the fizz, as would the use of granulated sugar in the drink, as he recommends (the sugar provides nucleation points for bubbles to form).
Boothby, Bill.The Champagne Cocktail remained a sporting-life favorite (one of its nicknames was “chorus girl’s milk”) well into the twentieth century, and it is still encountered, particularly in Europe.
Cocktails with Champagne
In the parlance of the bar, a cocktail or other drink topped off with champagne is known as a “Royal x” or an “x Royale” (sometimes “Imperial” is used instead). The roots of this usage stretch back to seventeenth-century England, where a drink normally made with beer or ale, when made with wine, was dubbed “royal”; thus punch made with wine instead of water was “Punch Royal.” By the end of the eighteenth century, champagne was frequently used for Punch Royal, particularly in France and Germany; it helped that champagne’s acidity gave essential balance to the punch, reducing the need for (often scarce) lemons. See Regent’s Punch and Chatham Artillery Punch.
It’s unclear precisely when the addition of champagne jumped from the punch bowl to the individual cocktail or fizz or cooler, but the practice seems to have been greatly facilitated by the introduction of the “champagne tap,” a French invention of the mid-nineteenth century that made it to the United Kingdom in the 1860s and United States in the 1870s. A spigot that was screwed through the cork, the tap allowed bartenders to pour small quantities of champagne without killing the wine’s carbonation. By 1882, Harry Johnson was instructing bartenders to “squirt a little champagne” into a Fancy Brandy Cocktail, while Bill Boothby’s Boothby Cocktail from the 1910s was simply a “Manhattan with a champagne float.” See Boothby, William.
Among the classic drinks enhanced with champagne are the intoxicating French 75, the soothing Black Velvet, and any number of “pick me ups” (champagne was a popular hangover remedy). Among modern classics, the Seelbach cocktail and Audrey Saunders’s 2004 Old Cuban are perhaps the best known. See Saunders, Audrey.
Although purists frequently claim that true champagne is wasted in cocktails and that they deserve only prosecco or other sparkling wines, the acidity of a good champagne, which serves to balance sweet ingredients, and its tight fizz, which adds texture, usually make champagne the expert’s choice.
Recipe (Champagne Cocktail): Place a sugar cube in the bottom of a large champagne flute, add 3 dashes of Angostura bitters, and fill with cold champagne. Twist lemon peel over the top.
Baker, Charles H. The Gentleman’s Companion, vol. 2: Jigger, Beaker and Glass. 1946; repr., Lanham, MD: Derrydale, 1992.
Boothby, William T. The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them. San Francisco: Pacific Buffet, 1908.
Thomas, Jerry. How to Mix Drinks. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1862.
Tomes, Robert. Panama in 1855. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.
By: Elizabeth Gabay