Cold Duck
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Cold Duck is the name of a sparkling wine made in the United States.
Origin
The wine was invented by Harold Borgman, the owner of Pontchartrain Wine Cellars in Detroit, in 1937. The recipe was based on a traditional German custom of mixing all the dregs of unfinished wine bottles with champagne. The wine he produced was given the name Kaltes Ende ("cold end" in German), until it was humorously altered to the similar sounding term Kalte Ente meaning "cold duck". The exact recipe now varies, but the original combined one part of Californian red wine with two parts of New York sparkling wine.[1]
Other wines
- During the early 1970s, the South Australian company Orlando Wines produced a sparkling red wine labelled 'Cold Duck'. Between 1971 and 1974, there were a number of trademark registrations, including Cold Turkey, Chicken, Gander, and Stork.
- Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery in South Africa now produce 'Fifth Avenue Cold Duck', also a sweet sparkling red.
Other uses
A jazz standard named "Cold Duck Time" by Eddie Harris has been performed by many jazz musicians, including Jeff Golub and Al Jarreau. Andrés Wines introduced their version of Cold Duck in Canada in the mid-1960s.They followed that with similar sweet red and white wines called Chanté. In 1971 they created Baby Duck – a soft-drink-sweet blend of red and white Chanté wines.
Hugely successful, Baby Duck was the best-selling domestic wine during the 1970s and it hatched numerous imitators:Canada Duck, Love-A-Duck, Kool Duck, Daddy Duck and Fuddle Duck were joined by Cold Turkey, etc… All of these wines driving the runaway expansion in the wine trade in the 1960s and 1970s were concocted from water, sugar and grapes that were judged unsuitable for making good quality dry table wines
