September 25, 2015

The 5 Best Wine Cocktails

Travel Design Manager (MAT Leave)

Wine purists, look away now.

London Cocktail Week begins on the 5th October and, to celebrate, we’ve decided to try to come up with our very favourite wine-based cocktails. Forget your Mojitos, your Margaritas and your Martinis – these are the drinks you want to be rustling up when you’re after something that’s just about on the right side of ostentation.

Kir

As it is the case that the finest wines often come from France, so too does one of our favourite wine cocktails. Kir, as you may know, is popularly drunk as an apéritif in that country, but also works just as well – as we can happily attest – served by itself. Named after the mayor of Dijon who popularised it, and made from crème de cassis and white wine (1/10 or 1/5 of the former, and the rest made up of the latter), it is a drink which is as surprisingly drinkable as it is immensely dangerous, considering how surprisingly drinkable it is. Take our word for it – this stuff tastes not entirely unlike Ribena, and goes down just as easily. It is also exceedingly high in alcohol content. You do the maths.

Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon is a cocktail which, more than anything else, benefits very much from how mind-blowingly, world-changingly awesome absolutely every single thing about it is. Let’s count off the ways:

Invented by Ernest Hemingway. In Paris.
Made up of absinthe and Champagne, presumably because its inventor had a lot of both lying around.
Exceedingly strong. Hemingway himself recommends you ‘drink three to five, slowly’.
It’s actually called Death in the Afternoon. Named after one of Hemingway’s books, sure, but we challenge you to find any cocktail on the planet that has a cooler name.

No more needs saying.

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Cool Melon Mint

We really should have put Death in the Afternoon last. Everything else might end up paling in comparison but, hey, let’s give it a go. Cool Melon Mint is a drink invented by Woodbridge, a Californian wine-maker, which involves blending melon cubes and elderflower cordial, and then adding Muscat and ice, before garnishing with mint and melon wedges. They recommend their own ‘Moscato’, but we reckon any sweet white wine will probably do. Genuinely pretty delicious, and Muscat and melon is a surprisingly cohesive match. So there you go. Remember when we were talking about Death in the Afternoon?

Buck’s Fizz

Two parts orange juice, one part Champagne. Simple, popular, and it has a great story behind it – it was essentially invented by the members of Buck’s, London, as an excuse to drink in the morning. We had to have this classic in here. Well, no, we didn’t, but it’s a fantastic excuse to post this:

Sangria Greco

Google won’t bring this one up, because it’s the invention of a certain Greek restaurant in West London, so we’ll just give you the recipe. Sangria Greco is made from red wine, fresh pineapple puree, framboise liquer and blueberries. It is, in a word, spectacular. Fruit and red wine don’t initially seem like they should work too well, sure, but what is a cocktail if not a pig-headed refusal to accept the rules of drinks-making in favour of chasing a quick and easy splash of colour? Sangria Greco. Remember it.