Cold Comfort
THE best cool drinks are uncomplicated, whether they arc non-alcoholic fruit drinks, such as peach tea, Shloer apple juice, or a simple citron presse; ice-cold lager beer in immensely tall glasses; or the two greatest of all wine mix- tures, both of which consist of half champagne with only one other ingredient. One is champagne-orange, half and half of ice-cold champagne and ice-cold fresh orange juice, and the other is Black Velvet. Black Velvet is made of equal parts of champagne and Guinness, by which I do riot mean other kinds of sparkling wine and other kinds of stout. (Nor should it be confused with a mixture I have heard of but never experienced, of milk stout and •sparkling perry, known to the fancy as Black Velveteen.) Champagne-orange, obviously, is low in alcohol and is a good mid-morning drink or early- morning pick-me-up; Black Velvet is both potent and nourishing and should follow physical exer- tion, whether on the river, the croquet lawn or the chaise-longue.
There are two schools of thought about icing wine-cups. One has it that if everything is very cold—jug, glass and tipple—then the ice in a drink won't melt and dilute it, especially if the guzzlers are blessed with a brisk rate of intake. My own view is that if you can get everything as cold as that without putting ice in it, why bother, and run even the remotest risk of dilu- tion and loss of flavour? At home, I never put ice in anything, but use either one of those German jugs with a separate detachable ice- cylinder (you can get them from Fortnum's, or get a friend to bring one back from Germany) or one of the cheaper Italian carafes with a sort of ice-gusset moulded into it (any big store has them). Get the drink ice-cold to begin with, in the refrigerator, and keep it cold in the jug or carafe.
There is an excellent cider-cup served at Trinity, Oxford, which consists of a glass of brown sherry to a quart of cider, slices of lemon and orange and (I admit) lumps of ice; Profes- sor Saintsbury's version (he was at Merton) added brandy, borage and a little soda-water.
But there is a lot to be said for cool drinks that are less complicated—ordinary white wines chilled in the refrigerator to rather cooler than you would expect an important hock to be served you in a good restaurant, and the merest shade sweeter than the most austere white burgundies, so that a fragrance will survive the severe chilling. Not expensive wines, ob- viously: the best for this sort of treatment seem to me to be Loire wines such as Vouvray, very young fresh Mosels, such as a 1959 Berncasteler Riesling, or Alsatian Traminers.
Almost anything will do, though, so long as it is wet enough, cold enough and plentiful enough; the best vintage champagne, for in- stance. Don't be seduced by drinks with strange, exotic, evocative or whimsical names. A friend of mine once played golf on a hot summer's day in the States with Senator Taft, and asked the great man after the game what he would like to drink. `A Black Cow,' said the senator, and my thirsty friend said, 'Well, senator, I think I'll follow your example'—only to discover that a Black Cow is sarsaparilla and ice-cream.
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