3 better than "champagne" cocktail recipes
The champagne cocktail is one classy drink. Recipes for it are even better when you use sparkling sweet wines instead of dry champagne and experiment with different flavors of bitters.
The champagne cocktail dates to the mid-1800s, making it one of America's oldest cocktail recipes. It couldn't be easier to make. Just drop a bitters-soaked sugar cube into a flute, pour champagne over the sugar cube and garnish the glass with a twist of lemon or orange peel.
Inspired by that simple elegance, we created three fun riffs of this timeless drink.
Our fruitty version calls for peach-kissed Duplin Sweet Poppy red wine and a touch of freshly squeezed orange juice. The classic champagne cocktail recipe calls for Angostura bitters, but we chose grapefruit bitters to add an fresh, bright citrus note to our Sweet Poppy version.
Duplin Sweet Lily, a white wine, was the star of our lemony take on the champagne cocktail recipe. Lemon bitters and a little fresh rosemary really elevated Sweet Lily's citrus notes.
Duplin Sweet Rosé' blush wine's fruitty aroma always reminds us of chocolate, so we saturated the sugar cube with cocoa bitters and garnished the final cocktail with dark chocolate shavings. The combination made a complex sipper that extra-satisfies a sweet tooth.
One important tip: Never use loose sugar or try to crush or dissolve the sugar cube in these cocktails. The whole point of the sugar cube is to add a different level of sweetness and create more bubbles as the cube dissolves on its own as you sip.
