Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail coupe, and garnish with an orange twist.
Though starting with the Ward 8, the end result was very different flavorwise, and the French ingredients work much better to me than the original.
In the wake of the Thirst Boston conference, I was thinking about the Ward 8 and the conversations I had that weekend about it. One of my major problems with the earliest recipe of the 1898 drink appearing in Robert Vermeire's 1922 Cocktails: How to Mix Them is that the orange juice clashed with the oaky American whiskey. I pondered what spirits might work well here, and my eyes drifted over to the Cognac section of my home bar. With a French theme, perhaps substituting Amer Picon for the orange juice might work especially given how well grenadine and Amer Picon pair in some of Trader Vic's recipes, plus the swap reminded me of Paul McGee's trading curaçao for orange juice. For a name, I dubbed this one the 8th Arrondissement which is the part of Paris that contains the Champs-Élysées.