Moonlight Cocktail

A bone-dry gin cocktail from the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, layering kirsch and dry white wine over fresh grapefruit juice for a bracing, aromatic sipper.

The Moonlight Cocktail appears in Harry Craddock's 1930 The Savoy Cocktail Book, where Craddock flags it plainly as "a very dry cocktail" — a fair warning for a drink built on gin, kirsch, dry white wine, and fresh grapefruit juice with no added sweetener. Craddock assembled the book during his years running the American Bar at London's Savoy Hotel, a gathering place for American bartenders and expatriates through the Prohibition era (1920-1933); he had himself left the United States for London after the Volstead Act ended his career at home. The Moonlight belongs to the Savoy's broad family of wine-and-spirit cocktails, in which a base spirit is stretched and reshaped by table wine — here a dry white — to yield something lighter and more austere than a purely spirituous drink. The kirsch, a clear cherry eau-de-vie distilled from whole fruit and stones, lends a faint almond-edged aroma, while the grapefruit supplies the tart backbone that gives the cocktail its dry, appetite-sharpening character.