12 Cocktails of Christmas - Slow Sparkle Cocktail

Jazz up a sloe gin champagne cocktail with an Australian plum gin and sparkling wine

We first came across this Saison L'Hiver cocktail on drinks website Diffordsguide whilst researching what we could mix with the Brookies Slow Gin, other than the conventional sloe gin fizz (see our other recipe called Slow Down and Smell the Coffee here). Intrigued, we gave it a try and found that it worked just as well with the Brookies so go on, give this a try and make it an all Aussie combination by using a local sparkling wine - we used the Tasmanian Arras but any dry sparkling or as stipulated in the Diffordsguide recipe, a rose sparkling will likely work just as well. As we've mentioned before, the Brookies Slow Gin is made using Davidson plums and isn't as viscous or sweet as your traditional sloe gin so for that reason, we slightly changed the ratio of honey water and gin here to get a better balance.

Christmas in Australia typically occurs in summer when it is hot as...so rather than the conventional turkey and trimmings, seafood is particularly popular to serve. To go with all that fresh briny goodness, what better than a bubbly cocktail?

Ingredients

• 1 dried clove

• 10ml honey water (we mixed equal parts honey and water together)

• 30ml Brookies Slow Gin

• 15ml lemon juice

• Sparkling wine

Muddle clove at base of shaker. Add Slow Gin, lemon juice and honey water and shake over ice.

Pour into champagne flute and top up with sparkling wine.