01 Sep Herbal Spritzer Cocktail Recipe

Posted at 07:00h in Blog, Cocktail Recipes, Cocktail Recipes: R&J Original, Liquor 101 by Roberts & June

Herbal Spritzer Cocktail Recipe

As we’ve been surviving the heat wave on spritzers this week, we’ve rightly been focused on drinks with a wine base. Wines make by far the most popular spritzers, and it’s easy to understand why. The point of spritzers is that they’re light, both in alcohol content and on the palate. A good way to accomplish that is to take the already relatively light wine and make it lighter with some seltzer.

But what if you’re not in a wine mood? After a week of relatively straightforward, sweet and fruity drinks, we found ourselves craving something a bit more complex and herbal. Well, we happened to have learned on our recent trip to France that liqueurs can work quite as well in a spritzer as wine (actually that one had both, which is worth remembering for those times we want to bump up the alcohol just a bit). Aperol does add a certain aromatic quality we’ve been missing, but we wanted to take things even further. So, we tried out a spritzer with the very intense Galliano, in which anise dominates but in a crowded field of other herbs. To keep the alcohol content low and the bring the flavor back down into refreshing spritzer territory, we bumped up the ratio of seltzer to liqueur, and discovered it’s delicious.

This recipe would work similarly with other herbal liqueurs, like Chartreuse, Genepy, or Strega, or even more fruity liqueurs if you’re not in the mood for wine but not for herbs either.