For New Year’s, Try a Champagne Cocktail That’s Secretly Just a Champagne Manhattan

The Champagne Cocktail, the Alfonso, and its many variations.

Dec 29, 2022

Let’s be real: On New Year’s Eve, you are going to drink Champagne.

Maybe you want to make a round of Old Fashioneds or weird Cynar drinks at midnight — and by “you,” I am obviously referring to me — but everyone else at the party will want to drink Champagne. You have to accept that you are going to end up drinking Champagne. Tough luck.

Actually, wait: It’s not tough luck at all. Champagne is bright, lively, effervescent, and inherently festive. Champagne is good, actually.

But you, a cocktail enthusiast, don’t have to drink just Champagne.

Under the right conditions, at the right time of year, Champagne and its sparkling wine siblings are also pretty great in cocktails.

With a few easy steps and ingredients you probably already have on hand, you can cocktail-ify your Champagne, adding depth, complexity, intrigue, and cocktail character to your glass of bubbly.

So for New Year’s, let’s return to the most basic, essential drink of the genre — the Champagne Cocktail.

And then let’s transform it into something just a little bit more complex, and a little bit less well known, with a should-be classic — the Alfonso — plus some easy-to-make riffs and variations, all of which take Champagne and turn it into something a little more like a Manhattan.

An Old Fashioned, But With Champagne?

I last wrote about Champagne cocktails — and, specifically, the Champagne Cocktail — two years ago, when this newsletter was still in its infancy. Very few of you were subscribers back then, so it’s worth briefly refreshing.

The Champagne Cocktail is essentially a Champagne Old Fashioned. You might not think of it that way when you have your first sip: It’s fizzy, bubbly, light, bright, and much more voluminous than the boozy two-ounce whiskey drink we now think of as an Old Fashioned.

But just as a conventional Old Fashioned is whiskey modified by bitters and sugar, the Champagne Cocktail is Champagne…modified by bitters and sugar. It’s the same underlying idea, with a very different character and presentation.

You can of course just make a Champagne cocktail for New Year’s Eve. If you’ve never done so, I highly recommend it: It’s a delicious drink, and a great little lesson in how relatively modest modifications can transform booze.

The most conventional way to make a Champagne Cocktail is with a sugar cube doused in Angostura Aromatic Bitters, which you then muddle and top with sparkling wine.

This method has the non-trivial advantage of requiring no significant preparation aside from assembling the ingredients and mixing them in a glass. However, it also requires a bit of effort to get the sugar cube to integrate with the rest of the drink. Inevitably, you either spend too long mixing the ingredients, or there’s a bit of sugar cube sludge left in the glass.

Hence my preference for using syrup. I typically like a rich (2:1) demerara syrup, which you can make in a few minutes in a blender, or, if you have time and inclination, a demerara gum syrup, which takes a bit longer and requires an immersion circulator, but is worth the effort.

Once you have the syrup, simply add bitters and champagne in a cocktail glass — I strongly prefer a cocktail vessel of about 4-6 ounces to a Champagne flute — then briefly stir them together.

Now you have a classic Champagne Cocktail.

Champagne Cocktail

4 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
¼ ounce rich (2:1) demerara syrup OR demerara gum syrup (OR 1 brown sugar cube)
3 ounces Champagne or other sparkling wine

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a coupe or Nick and Nora glass.
Stir to combine.
Garnish with an orange peel.

Notice how this drink both does and does not resemble the traditional Old Fashioned.

It has the same essential sugar/bitters modification, yet a completely different vibe. It’s both a familiar and completely novel experience, like meeting an outgoing, upbeat sibling born into a family of brooding misanthropes. You’ve encountered this type before, but never with this personality.

Make It a Manhattan?

Now that you’ve checked in on the structure of the Champagne Cocktail, you are equipped to understand the Alfonso.

If the Champagne Cocktail is just a Champagne-based riff on the Old Fashioned, the Alfonso is something like a Champagne-based riff on the Manhattan.

The Alfonso can be found in Harry Craddock’s always-reliable 1930 mixed drinks guide, The Savoy Cocktail Book,

The only real difference between a Champagne Cocktail and an Alfonso is that the Alfonso includes an ounce of Dubonnet. It’s reportedly named after Spanish King Alfonso XIII, who is said to have encountered this drink while exiled in France.

This newsletter has not exactly dwelled on Dubonnet-based drinks, but it’s an old ingredient that appears with some frequency in cocktails from the early 1900s. Most notably, it’s an essential ingredient in the not-too-cleverly named Dubonnet Cocktail, which was reportedly Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite tipple.

If you’re not familiar with Dubonnet, it’s a fortified, aromatized, sweet wine, with a bit of spice and a distinctly fruit-forward character. Although there are obviously some differences, it shares an awful lot of characteristics with another fortified wine that you almost certainly are familiar with: sweet vermouth.

And the Manhattan, of course, can be understood as an Old Fashioned with sweet vermouth swapped in for sugar/sugar syrup.

In the Alfonso, the Dubonnet is an addition rather than a swap, but this just mellows out the drink a bit more. The crisp dryness of Champagne more than offsets the sweetness.

The core recipe thus looks like this:

Alfonso

4 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
¼ ounce rich (2:1) demerara syrup)
1 ounce Dubonnet
3 ounces Champagne

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
Stir briefly to combine.
Garnish with an orange peel.

Like sweet vermouth in a Manhattan, the Dubonnet adds a fruity, rich, cherry-ish sweetness to the drink, as well as a bit of body. Compared to a basic Champagne Cocktail, it makes it even more, well, cocktail-like — a lush and complex chord rather than a single note.

Make Your Own Alf-Cocktail

Once you understand how the Dubonnet works in the Alfonso, the possibilities for variation and substitution become rather obvious.

Since Dubonnet is a fortified, aromatized, sweetened wine…why couldn’t you substitute any other fortified, aromatized, sweetened wine in the same slot?

I ask this question not only in the interests of Cocktail Science, but because I suspect that most readers do not have a bottle of Dubonnet waiting for them on their bar cart or (if opened) in their refrigerator door.

However, if you are the sort of person who subscribes to a cocktail newsletter, then there’s a reasonably good chance that you have a bottle of sweet vermouth, sherry, or other fortified wine that could act as a substitute in this format.

To be clear: When I say “substitute” I am not saying you will produce a drink with precisely the same flavor profile as Dubonnet. Rather, I am saying you can produce something interesting and tasty with the same sort of character — a sibling or cousin with many of the same personality quirks.

Actually, I’ll go further than that: I tested a number of cocktail-friendly fortified wines in the Dubonnet slot, and what I found was that some of them make what I believe are obviously better cocktails.

In particular, Cocchi Americano, the venerable fortified wine that makes a great Martini variation and an excellent substitute for the old Kina Lillet in a Corpse Reviver No. 2, makes a positively sublime variation, with a subtle bitter-root kick and a grassy, almost honeyed sweetness.

But I also had very good luck with various sweet vermouths as well as cream sherry.

I don’t know exactly what you have on hand, but if it’s a fortified wine on the sweet side — a sweet or blanc vermouth, a sweet sherry that isn’t a bargain-cheap cooking wine, or even a port or Madeira, it’s almost certainly profitable to try it in the Dubonnet slot, leaving all other elements the same.

I tried more than a half dozen variations, and the only one that didn’t quite work was Punt e Mes, which pushed the drink in a bitter direction that didn’t quite fit with the Champagne.

It’s not too surprising that these variations work so well. Fortified wines are, more or less by definition, wines modified with flavors and ingredients that…er, go well with wine. So it’s not exactly a shock that so many of them pair so nicely with Champagne.

The point is: The Alfonso expanded universe is very much worth exploring.

I’m a cocktail guy, not a wine guy, so I don’t have highly specific recommendations for the Champagne. For what it’s worth, I tested all of these with Ernest Rapeneau Champagne Brut that I purchased from Trader Joe’s. If you feel knowledgeable about champagne and its sparkly relatives, you should of course feel free to use your favorite bottle. But just as conventional Old Fashioned cocktails can be used to augment and dress up merely decent whiskey, these Champagne cocktails can be used to dress up sparkling wine that otherwise might rate as merely serviceable. Even as a proponent of overthinking your drinks I would gently caution against overthinking this.

Here are a handful of variations I recommend, all of which adhere to my must-reference-the-original naming scheme.

In our Manhattan-filtered view of this drink, the most obvious swap is just sweet vermouth. I find that bolder vermouths work well here, but any flavorful sweet vermouth that you enjoy in a cocktail should work.

Project: ALF

4 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
¼ ounce rich (2:1) demerara syrup
1 ounce sweet vermouth, such as Carpano Antica Formula or Cocchi di Torino
3 ounces Champagne

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
Stir briefly to combine.
Garnish with an orange peel.

Swapping in the quinine-enhanced Cocchi Americano Bianco, in turn, gives this variation a sneaky bitter backbone without taking the drink anywhere near Negroni territory.

Alfred Pennyworth

4 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
¼ ounce rich (2:1) demerara syrup
1 ounce Cocchi Americano
3 ounces Champagne

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
Stir briefly to combine.
Garnish with an orange peel.

Finally, I recommend trying this with a good sweet sherry, which will subtly transform this cocktail into a dessert-like comfort drink.

Alfalfa, That Little Rascal

4 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
¼ ounce rich (2:1) demerara syrup
1 ounce cream sherry (I used Lustau Capataz Andrés)
3 ounces Champagne

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
Stir briefly to combine.
Garnish with an orange peel.

I’ve tried all of the variations above and can recommend them. But even if you don’t have the precise ingredients I called for, it’s worth taking advantage of the one night a year you’re almost certain to have an open bottle of Champagne to experiment with the combination of bitters, sugar, fortified wine, and sparkling wine. You’ll learn a bit about fortified wine, which we will be exploring in greater depth over the coming year, and, if nothing else, you’ll enjoy some Champagne.

And with that: Happy New Year’s! The large dogs and I will return to your inbox in 2023.