Ahhh, New Year’s Eve and the perfect accompaniment to the magic & wonder of a new year – a champagne cocktail! After an early dinner and movie with friends, I returned home to a chilled bottle of J.Roget Brut sparkling wine, recipes for several classic champagne cocktails, and my old favorite Dick Clark in Times Square.
J.Roget? Yes! J.Roget’s claim to fame is that it is cheap. I purchased this bottle on sale at Meijer’s for $4.49; www.wine-searcher.com lists the average price as $5.00 per bottle. Its parent company Constellation Wines U.S. promotes it on their website as “Key Selling Points: consistent best seller because it mixes so well with other cocktail ingredients” and only as that. Constellation Wines owns many popular brands including Arbor Mist, Blackstone, Clos du Bois, Estancia, Ravenswood, Robert Mondavi, Wild Horse, and Woodbridge making them, per their website, “the world’s largest wine business by dollar volume.”
In the category of “cheap champagne” aka inexpensive bubbly, J. Roget shares the spotlight with Andre, Cook’s, and Korbel all of which can be found for under $10. Moving up another $5 will make a world of difference in your enjoyment of it undiluted by cocktail mixes. However, my choice tonight was based purely on remembering the first time I drank J.Roget.
I was first introduced to J.Roget as a young businesswoman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the days when a wanna-be businesswomen emulated the three-piece suit look of businessmen. My blouses were either 100% cotton men’s shirt style that I sent to the drycleaners to be washed, lightly starched, and returned on hangers, or cotton-poly blends with attached floppy bowties. This was a heyday of eating out and drinking at trendy places. The Wine Bar was just such a place with its high-tech resealing system as the centerpiece of its décor. And I would join friends there to enjoy a glass of bubbly and feel sophisticated, even worldly.
Obviously, I wasn’t but how nice to know that at one time in your life you could feel that way for $5 a glass. Then, I’d go buy J. Roget at the “liquor store” and the bottle cost almost two dollars less than I was paying by the glass. In case you’ve never tried to buy a bottle of anything in Pennsylvania, the “liquor store” is any retail outlet of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) which controls all wine, spirits, and beer beverages in the state, aka Commonwealth, of Pennsylvania. Today, PLCB lists a bottle of J.Roget at $6.39.
My recipe of choice was Jamie Oliver’s Charlotta champagne cocktail: old-fashioned champagne glass, pop a sugar cube in the center, few drops of Angostura bitters on the cube, top with splash of brandy, top with thin strips of orange peel, top off with Champagne or Prosecco. His is just a twist off the classic components. Martha Stewart Weddings website lists the Class Champagne Cocktail is a white sugar cube instead of brown, and Cognac instead of brandy served in a flute. The Champagne Cocktail - sugar cube, bitters, champagne with a twist of lemon peel, was named by Esquire magazine as one of the top ten cocktails of 1934.
My choice of glass was as classic as the cocktail. This is from a set I found at Goodwill in Pittsburgh in my same heyday of The Wine Bar. The bowl-shaped stemmed glass, known as a coupe, was the glass of choice through the 1960s. F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby gives his hero over-sized champagne coupes described as “larger than finger bowls” depicting the excesses of Prohibition America.
The Great Gatsby, 1974 The Great Gatsby, 2012
New Year’s Eve ultimately brings the moment when the world erupts to shout “Happy New Year” and turn to the person next to them for a midnight kiss. We know that moment from the movie “When Harry Met Sally” when Sally starts to leave the party because she has no one to kiss at midnight until Harry arrives to confess true love and offer happy ever after. Lacking a Harry, I share with you a favorite quote from a different movie: Old Acquaintance, 1934, Bette Davis, “There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”
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