Upscale Parties Call for These Champagne Cocktail Recipes

Raise a glass: these three well-balanced drinks take hosting to the next level. 

In reality, though, this mid-19th century party drink – nicknamed ‘show girls’ milk’ – is usually horribly imbalanced: insipid at the start and then overly sweet and bitter at the end. It’s a waste of good champagne.

So let me save you some time this holiday season: forget the classic champagne cocktail. If you really want to celebrate with something sparkling, then drink one of these three more interesting recipes instead.

Save your best bubbles though – middle-of-the-road brut non-vintages tend to be better for cocktails, as they’re more willing team players than vintage or very expensive cuvées that are more assertive in style. So, leave the Dom Pérignon P2 in the fridge.

How to make a yuzu champagne cocktail

Ingredients

25ml yuzushu

100ml champagne

Glass: flute, coupe or ice-filled rocks

Garnish: lemon or yuzu twist, or a pretty edible flower

Method

For a crowd, simply pop a bit of chilled yuzushu in each glass and then top up with champagne. Or just knock it up by the jug.

If you want something really easy, then champagne cocktails don’t get simpler than this – consider it a French 75 with a Japanese twist. I absolutely adore yuzu’s sunburst-y aromas of grapefruit, mandarin, and lemon. And we’re just entering the yuzu harvest in East Asia right now, so this drink is very much in season. Fresh yuzu juice is very tart on its own; yuzushu (which is basically sake-based yuzu liqueur) is better for cocktails. The level of sweetness varies from brand to brand so you may want to add a dash of sugar syrup as well.

If you can lay your hands on a real yuzu fruit for the twist, then excellent – just spritz over the drink and discard, as yuzu’s fantastically aromatic oils can sometimes be quite bitter. Cocktail Elements’s distilled yuzu spray – which can be misted on drinks like a scent – is also a brilliant short-cut.

For a lower-alcohol version of this drink, swap the champagne for sparkling jasmine tea – Jasmine by Saicho is delicious and completely alcohol-free.

How to make a French 75

Ingredients

25ml gin

12.5ml freshly squeezed lemon juice

6.25ml sugar syrup (to make, dissolve two cups of caster sugar in one cup of water, over a low heat and leave to cool)

50ml champagne

Glass: cocktail glass, flute or ice-filled rocks

Garnish: lemon twist

Method

Shake the gin, lemon juice and sugar syrup. Strain into glass. Top with champagne and stir.

This icy meteor of gin, lemon, champagne, and sugar is one of my favorite party drinks. It’s sophisticated and fun, easy to make at scale, and extremely efficacious. There’s evidence of people (including Charles Dickens himself) mixing gin and champagne as early as the mid-1800s. But the French 75, in this form at least, is a racy Jazz Age recipe. It’s thought to have been named after a French field gun used in WWI.

If you’re making it for a party, knock up a jug of the lemon, gin, and sugar mix in advance (don’t bother shaking), and then chill well for a few hours. The measurements look fiddly but it’s really just gin, lemon, and sugar combined in a ratio of 4:2:1.

Just before serving, add the chilled champagne to the jug along with a load of ice, and then dispense liberally, in either coupes, flutes or in tumblers, on the rocks. (The same method can also be used for the air mail below.)

How to make an air mail

Ingredients

30ml golden rum

10ml freshly squeezed lime juice

15ml honey syrup (to make the honey syrup, mix honey 2:1 with hot water and leave to cool)

50ml champagne

Glass: ice-filled rocks

Garnish: mint sprig

Method

Shake the first three ingredients with ice, then strain over ice and top with champagne (if mixing at scale, follow the same instructions as the French 75).

This classic rum cocktail is essentially a honey-kissed daiquiri topped with sparkling wine. It’s great with white rum but I like it best with golden, which rounds it out a bit more and – depending on which rum you use – can also add a subtle touch of tropical funk. The Appleton Estate Signature Blend from Jamaica is beautifully balanced and excellent for mixing. The mint garnish gives the drink a more summery, herbal lift – just give the sprigs a sharp slap between your palms before adding, to release the scented oils.