The clocks go back this Sunday, and with them goes the last pretence that we are still living in the light. The evenings arrive early and uninvited, the radiators tick back into life, and the drinks cabinet quietly reorganises itself: the gin retreats, the brown spirits step forward. This is brandy weather, and brandy weather has a cocktail. It is nearly a hundred years old, it fits in the palm of your hand, and almost nobody makes it any more. The Sidecar deserves better.

It is a simple thing on paper: cognac, orange liqueur, lemon. Three ingredients, no shaking tin full of clutter, no tweezers, no smoke. And yet the Sidecar is one of the easiest cocktails to get slightly wrong and one of the most satisfying to get exactly right. Here is how to land on the right side of that line.

A drink with a disputed birth

Nobody can quite agree on where the Sidecar came from, which is usually a sign that a drink is worth arguing about. The most repeated story places it in Paris at the end of the First World War, named for an officer who arrived at his favourite bistro in the sidecar of a motorcycle and liked a little something to warm him before dinner. A rival claim belongs to London, and to the bar at Buck's Club, where a barman named Pat MacGarry is often handed the credit.

What is not in dispute is the paperwork. The Sidecar turns up in print in 1922, in two of the first great cocktail books: Robert Vermeire's Cocktails: How to Mix Them and Harry MacElhone's ABC of Mixing Cocktails. By the roaring middle of that decade it had become one of the defining drinks of the age, the sort of thing ordered in a fur coat. Then fashion moved on, as it does, and the Sidecar spent most of the last century waiting politely in the index. As the classics come back into the light, its moment is now.

The argument about the ratio

Before you touch a bottle, settle the only question that really matters, which is balance. The Sidecar exists in two historical schools. The French school pours equal parts of all three, which makes a tart, bracing drink for people who take their cocktails like a slap. The English school softens that to two parts cognac for one each of liqueur and lemon, which most modern palates quietly prefer.

The sensible place to begin sits close to the English end. Fifty millilitres of cognac, twenty of orange liqueur, twenty of fresh lemon juice. That is more or less the ratio the International Bartenders Association settled on, and it is a very good starting point. From there you adjust to taste and to the sweetness of your particular bottles: a touch more lemon if it drinks heavy, a whisper more liqueur if it bites.

The cognac question

This is where the drink is won or lost. With so few ingredients, the cognac is not a background player, it is the whole personality of the glass. You do not want the youngest, rawest bottle on the shelf, and you certainly do not want to tip a venerable XO into a shaker, which is a little like using a first-growth claret to deglaze a pan. The sweet spot is a VSOP: aged long enough to have grown some warmth and dried fruit, young enough to still taste of the drink rather than the cellar. Rémy Martin VSOP is the textbook choice here, all baked apricot, vanilla and a gentle spiced finish, and it behaves as though it was built for this cocktail. If you would rather spend less, Hennessy VS does the job with a cleaner, brighter edge, and nobody at the table will think the worse of you for it.

The orange liqueur matters almost as much. The classic choice is a triple sec, the clear, bittersweet orange spirit that gives the Sidecar its lift and its backbone. Reach for one made properly rather than the sticky stuff loitering at the back of the cupboard. Merlet Triple Sec, made by a family of distillers in the Cognac region itself, is bright and clean and keeps its orange on the right side of boiled sweets. And use fresh lemons, always: the bottled juice tastes of the cupboard it came from.

How to make it

The method is mercifully short. Fill a shaker with ice. Add fifty millilitres of VSOP cognac, twenty of triple sec and twenty of fresh lemon juice. Shake hard and with conviction, for longer than feels necessary, until the tin is painfully cold and beaded with frost. Strain into a chilled coupe. That is the whole performance.

The only real decision left is the sugar rim, and here you may please yourself. Purists wave it away as a frippery. Others like a half-rim, sugar on one side of the glass so each sip can be taken sweet or dry at will, which is a quietly civilised piece of engineering. If you do sugar the rim, use caster sugar and a wipe of lemon to make it stick, and do it before you pour rather than after.

Where it tends to go wrong

Three mistakes account for almost every disappointing Sidecar. The first is warm, under-shaken dilution, which leaves the drink flabby, so shake it harder and colder than you think you should. The second is tired lemon, which turns the whole thing dull, so squeeze it fresh and to order. The third is burying good cognac under too much liqueur, which hides the very thing you are paying for. Pour a shade less sweet than you expect, taste, and correct upward. A Sidecar should arrive sharp and glinting, like a good opening line.

Last pour

The Sidecar is a drink for exactly this stretch of the year, when the light has gone, the cooking has turned richer and a short, bright, grown-up cocktail is precisely the thing to open the evening. It asks for three bottles, two minutes and a cold glass, and it gives back a small, perfect ritual for the dark half of the calendar. If it leaves you curious about the spirit underneath it, there is more on how to drink cognac on its own terms. But start on Sunday, when the clocks have fallen back and the afternoon turns to evening by teatime, and you will understand why this one refuses to disappear.