chatham artillery punch

Peels of 6 Lemons
1 cup Sugar
8 oz Lemon Juice
12 oz Maker's Mark Bourbon
12 oz Courvoisier VSOP Cognac
12 oz Plantation Xaymaca Rum
1 - 1 1/2 Bottles Sparkling Wine

Make an oleosaccharum of 6 lemon peels plus 1 cup sugar; after 1-2+ hours, dissolve the sugar in 8 oz lemon juice and bring the final volume to 12 oz with water. Add the syrup to 12 oz each of Bourbon, Cognac, and rum over large format ice in a punch bowl. Stir to chill and top off with the Champagne.
Two Thursdays ago, the Boston Shaker shop in Somerville hosted two rounds of the History of Bar Tools seminar. The seminar was taught by Ethan Kahn, the general manager of the Cocktail Kingdom store and product line, and I attended the noon session aimed at bartenders. To greet us, Lonnie Newburn of the Boston Shaker and Jack Kavanaugh of Beam Suntory assembled the Chatham Artillery Punch via the recipe provided in David Wondrich's Imbibe! and Punch books. I estimated that they made this recipe to half scale (and provided the measurements as such above) and assumed that any aberrations to Wondrich's recipe were slight. As a further connection to Wondrich, the punch was served in the bowl and ladle set that Cocktail Kingdom collaborated with him on, and I was impressed at how elegant the set was (see the second photo for the attention to detail).
In Punch, Wondrich described how the punch was created by Mr. A. H. Luce in the 1850s to welcome the Republican Blues when they visited Macon, Georgia. The earliest recipe that he sourced was from The Augusta Chronicle in 1885 which built the punch in a "horse bucket," and it was described as, "Rumor hath it every solitary man of the Blues was put under the table by this deceiving, diabolical and most delightful compound." Indeed, the combination was rather smooth with a lightly carbonated and citrus flavor and a blurred identity for the liquor component.