“Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child! Ada! Sole daughter of my house and heart?”
Ada Lovelace née Byron was Lord and Lady Byron’s only daughter, indeed the poet’s sole legitimate heir. The poem from which the above line is drawn, was written after Byron separated from his wife — just a month after Ada was born in 1815 — and left England for good. It was a bitter parting.
Ada’s mother, Anne Isabella, was fiercely protective of her daughter, pushing her to study Mathematics and Logic in a bid to make her as unlike her father as possible. At the time that Lord Byron left England, he had been mired in debt and some disrepute for his affairs with myriad women; rumours swirled too of a possible entanglement with his half sister Augusta Leigh. (He was dead by the time Ada turned eight.)
Lady Byron’s efforts bore fruit in that Ada is now known to us as the first-ever computer programmer, for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. As an inspiring figure in the world of STEM, there have been tributes aplenty paid to Ada’s legacy. At least some of them have taken liquid forms: from a gin named after her, to cocktails derived from her algorithmic contribution.
Take for instance, the “Byronary Code” — a cocktail that offers a twist on the Tom Collins and combines Tapatio 110 with lemon juice, Campari, simple syrup, orange bitters, and club soda. Then there is the simply named “Love Lace”, which mixes Tanqueray No. 10 gin with champagne and elderflower cordial, lemon juice and grapefruit bitters. Its taste is described as “short, floral and citrus-led”. Another cocktail in Ada’s name is the “Lovelace Martini”: gin, vodka, triple sec, Lillet Blanc (a fortified French wine); the verdict on it seems to be “dangerous (it goes down very smooth so it’s apt to knock you out if you aren’t paying attention) and delicious”.
In 2019, the Francis Ford Coppola Winery released a line of spirits that honoured important women from history. For Ada Lovelace, they created a gin “with a forward-thinking Code of 10 Botanicals”. The base spirit comes from grain while the major botanicals are juniper, lemon and rose.
While the Ada Lovelace Gin works well for most cocktails (especially martinis), there’s one that uses it to great effect: the “Crimson Drift”, which combines it with elderflower liqueur, simple syrup, fresh lemon juice, the white of one egg, and a claret.
“Bright and vivid, it leaps from the glass,” reads an almost poetic line from a review of the Ada Lovelace Gin. Lord Byron would have approved.
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