Champagne & Wine Cocktails
When making any cocktail with Champagne be sure to add the Champagne to the flute last. Pour the Champagne slowly over the other ingredients to avoid an overflow. Stirring these cocktails is not usually necessary, but when you do, stir slowly and gently. For best results serve Champagne cocktails right away.
A wine cocktail is a mixed drink similar to a true cocktail. It is made predominantly with wine (including Champagne and Prosecco), into which distilled alcohol or other drink mixer is combined. The distinction between a wine cocktail and a cocktail with wine is the relative amounts of the various alcohols. In a wine cocktail, the wine product is the primary alcohol by volume compared to the distilled alcohol or mixer.
Champagne Cocktail: 3 oz. Chilled Champagne, 1/2 oz. Cognac (optional), 2 Dashes Angostura Bitters, 1 Sugar Cube. Garnish: Maraschino Cherry & Lemon Twist
Drop a sugar cube in to a champagne flute. Soak the sugar with the bitters.
Pour in the cognac and fill with the glass with champagne. Drop in a cherry, and add the lemon twist on the rim.
Indications of Champagne is rather diverse, because every wine trader (there are well over 120 of them) has it’s own style, bases an a long tradition. Brut without a year marking, champagnes with a year mark, prestige wines (mixtures of different harvests) and Rosé (colored pink by adding a tiny bit of red wine) champagnes are the main kinds of champagne. For cocktails, a classical brand brut without a year will do quite well. Barkeepers use champagne for classics like the champagne cocktail, but are starting to use this festive drink in other cocktails as well, because it makes the cocktails more refined.
Wine-based cocktails come in endless varieties: red wines, white wines, champagne, other sparkling wines, and fortified wines can all make great cocktail ingredients. When making wine cocktails, it’s generally a good idea to use inexpensive wines—fine wines are best appreciated for their complexity and nuances, not for what they add to mixed drinks. In fact, plenty of wines that are great for making cocktails are sold for under $12 per bottle. Though champagne-based drinks are served without ice, other wine-based cocktails can be enjoyed either straight up or on the rocks, unless otherwise noted.
By far the natural cocktail wine is sparkling wine. The Champagne Cocktail (Victor Laszlo ordered one in Casablanca, though his character seemed more of the ginger ale type) is elegance itself: a sugar cube, a few dashes of wonderful bitters, topped with Champagne and garnished with a twist. The simplest Mimosa is a Champagne and orange juice mix, garnished with an orange slice; variations call for a dash of orange liqueur (Curaçao, Gran Marnier, Cointreau or Triple Sec). An April in Paris is essentially the same thing without the juice: an ounce of the orange liqueur topped with Champagne (less pulp evidently).
Mix whisky with vermouth rosso and hey presto, you have the Manhattan! Indeed, vermouth is a versatile mixer that can be mixed with almost any spirit. Then there are a whole range of champagne or sparkling wine-based cocktails: the Bellini; the Champagne Cocktail (half peg brandy, lemon twist, dash of bitters, top with champagne); the evocative Kir Royale; and my favourite Black Velvet, a mix of champagne and Guinness stout!
