Low Alcohol Cocktails: Sake Red Wine Spritzer Recipe

Luckily for us, our private photography lesson with Portland-based photographer Lara Ferroni coincided with Imbibe magazine’s Summer Drinks issue. Lara mixed up the New Fashioned cocktail, a low alcohol drink mixed with red wine during the workshop, and we were tasked with staging and photographing it. (Original recipe featured on page 44 and on the magazine’s website). We loved it so much–a photographer must drink/eat her props, after all–I returned to the winery and asked Chef Todd Knoll to help me transform Liz Wolferman’s original recipe to include an elegant red wine like Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon and a few other local ingredients. The result? A wine cocktail with a Sonoma County twist. It’s a red wine spritzer/sake cocktail hybrid that’s refreshing, light and not too sweet.

We also substituted Jardesca’s Sonoma-made aperitiva for the Italian one, grapefruit shrub in lieu of grapefruit bitters, Meyer lemons rather than regular ones, and added craft tonic and a little syrup to balance the quintessential bitterness of this classic aperitif cocktail.