Jordan and Joe’s Wine Cocktails

Hi, I'm Jordan Salcito here with Joe Campanale. We're at Anfora Wine Bar, my very favorite wine bar, for eHow.com. Today, we're going to talk about wine cocktails that are great for the colder months. One of my absolute favorites is called the New York Sour. It's a very classic cocktail and it's delicious. It's very versatile and it's pretty easy to make. All you need is some red wine on hand, a little bit of rye whiskey, which is a spirit very near and dear to New York, some lemon juice, some simple syrup. And Joe and I were talking earlier, he had a great point, if you don't have rye whiskey at home, don't worry, you can use bourbon, you can use scotch, very very versatile. I like the crisp bite of rye but you can certainly use anything. Alright, I'm thirsty, Jordan, let's make this drink. Sorry, Joe. I don't mean to keep you waiting. So you have two ounces of our rye whiskey. Two ounces rye whiskey. One ounce of our fresh squeezed lemon juice and if you have some lemon juice left over from yesterday, get rid of it, make new fresh lemon juice. We do it every single day and then that's an ounce of simple syrup which we've spoken about it before, a lot of the simple syrup is equal parts sugar and water cooked down until it's all dissolved and it's just a great, it's a great bartending tool because it dissolves really really well into our cocktail. You see Jordan is now using her Boston shaker. It's two parts, it's the metal cup and the pint glass and what she's doing is she's shaking it and when you shake a drink it really aerates, it aerates the drinks, changes the texture of your cocktail and makes it really light and frothy. I'm to do the play by play now. I love it, I love the narration. So she's pouring it into her pint glass and then this is called a Hawthorn strainer. She's going to strain it out into her martini glass or cocktail glass, that looks beautiful Jordan. Thank you Joe. Then the jigger is going to be important for the wine element just because what you're doing, you're creating a float which is where you have a separation of the two different alcohols. So, this is one of our favorite wines, the Bellis. Jordan is the proprietress of Bellis, if I can make up that word right there, a great Tuscan red wine. So let's see, so what happens now? So now, we have our little spoon, let's see if I'm going to do this well. So the reason that she uses the spoon is that the spoon is going to slow down the flow of the wine and make sure that it hits that cocktail very very slowly and gently and you have that nice delineation. You have the deep dark red on the top, the rest of that beautiful sour cocktail on the bottom. That's gorgeous, my God. You have to try it. This is actually specifically for you. I guess this is the hard part of the job but I guess I will. Wow, that's beautiful. Oh wow, that's delicious. You get the deep red berry flavors from the red wine a little bit of the vanilla and the cinnamon but then you have all this great acid from the sour cocktail and then the spiciness and the vanilla flavors from the rye really play off the wine in a beautiful way. That is delicious. I'm going to do for you one of my absolute favorite cocktails. It's something that is a little bit easier, a little bit less sophisticated but it's really fun, it's really easy to do at home, it's called a Bicyclette Cocktail, and this is a cocktail for the old timers, especially the old timer cyclists you know, cycling is very popular in France and Italy and basically this is a drink that the cyclists would have after a long ride or even sometimes in the middle of a long ride and it was something that was very light and refreshing. Okay, let's get started, you take a wine glass, fill it up with a couple of ice cubes and then you're going to add two ounces of Campari. Campari is one of my favorite favorite aperitifs. It is bitter. It obviously has this beautiful red color. It has so many different applications. I absolutely love Campari. It's on all of my drink lists and then an aromatic white wine. So, Campari is bitter and sweet. This aromatic white wine will have a little bit more sweetness to it and it will balance out the Campari. Yum, from Erza Goverd's Garden. Oh yeah, this happens to be a very nice aromatic white wine but you don't need to use something nice for this at all, it will be lost in the drink and then just some soda water, just top it off with some soda water. So it's very similar to a spritz cocktail which you see a lot in Austria and in Northeastern Italy and then I like to take an orange peel. You can use an orange wedge, lemon as well but I think orange pairs a lot better with Campari and then I'll just give it a little squirt and you release all those beautiful essential oils and drop that in and you have the Bicyclette cocktail. Yum, Jordan I'd love for you to have a taste. I would love to have a taste. It's beautiful, you have this little tap dance of the sweeter flavors from the aromatic Riesling and then you have the more bitter notes from the Campari and the aromas of the fresh orange and it's gorgeous. you have a little bit of a spritz from the carbonation, it's delicious. These are two of our very favorite wine cocktails. Next time you are in New York City, come visit Joe here at Anfora, come visit me at Crown. Catch us again, for eHow.com.