The Most Beautiful Sparklin Cocktail: Il Tricolore!

Hi, Friends of Cocktails! Are your cocktails usually boring? Do you garnish them with a sad cherry or a dry citrus peel, and leave it at that? Let’s fix that today by making a cocktail that looks fun and tastes even better. I’m calling it Il Tricolore Milk Punch, and we’ll make it in 3 parts: the milk punch base, the colorful and tasty garnish, and finally we’ll put it all together with some bubbles.

I created this cocktail as a part of my partnership with FIOL Prosecco, which has been ongoing for 3 years now. You’ve seen plenty of bubbly cocktails come from that on Cocktail Time, but I’ve also spoken around the world to bartenders about Mastering Bubbles and making Prosecco the center point of the cocktail–in today’s cocktail that will be FIOL Rosé!

FIOL Rosé is a refreshing and elegant expression of FIOL, with the Pinot Noir shining through. I’ll talk more about its aroma and flavor profile when we get to the colorful garnish, but let’s start with the first part of the cocktail: a silky milk punch infused with floral, citrusy, and spicy notes. The base I’ll be using will be a citrusy-forward gin, and you’ll also need lemon juice, floral honey, and rose water, plus pink peppercorns and coconut milk for the milk punch part.

First I’ll juice the lemons and turn my floral honey into a syrup using my Syrup Calcultators–and it’s best if you get acacia honey as they will match the acacia notes in FIOL. So with that we’re ready to start, it’s Cocktail Time!

Il Tricolore Milk Punch Base

● 180mL · 6oz Gin

● 60mL · 2oz Honey Syrup

● 60mL · 2oz Lemon Juice

● 4g Rose Water

● 90mL · 3oz Coconut Milk

● 4.8g Pink Peppercorns

I’ll first combine the gin, honey syrup, lemon juice, and rose water using a magnetic stirrer. Now to get the milk part ready I’ll first lightly crush the pink peppercorns with a mortar & pestle, to make the infusion of flavors more efficient.

Heating things up will help as well, so we’ll place both the peppercorns and the milk into a pot over medium high heat. We’ll bring the milk to a light simmer, and once it’s nice and aromatic we’ll pour the floral gin-lemon-honey mixture over it and let it stand for 10 minutes. This process curdles the milk, because of the acidity of the cocktail, which is key for clarification.

After that, strain it all through a muslin cloth or coffee filter. Expect the first part to be cloudy, so once the curds create an additional filter you’ll see the liquid running clear. Move the filter and re-filter the first part. Now just give it time for everything to filter through and that’s your milk punch base. But let’s now move to the fun part: the garnish.

This is where we turn a floral cocktail into an Italian flag–but that wasn’t my main concern when creating this garnish. As mentioned in my e-book on garnishes, the garnish isn’t just for looks, but to elevate the cocktail and enhance the whole drinking experience. So I studied the flavor profiles of both FIOL Rosé and the classic FIOL and then paired the garnish with that.

Our garnishes will elevate the herbal and berry notes of prosecco, before letting the floral notes take over. So to create some gels, I’ll use Ultratex, a quick, efficient and super simple ingredient to work with for making gels. Let’s begin by making our minty, green gel.

Green Peppermint Gel

● 120g Hot Water

● 2g Peppermint

● 50g Sugar

● 1g Salt

● 10g Ultratex

● Green Food Coloring

Start by steeping the peppermint in hot water for 5 minutes. After this time has passed, strain the tea and you’ll end up with around 100mL or 3.33oz of the tea. We’ll use it while it’s still warm to dissolve in the sugar and salt, before adding in the Ultratex and green food coloring–and remember that a little bit goes a long way.

We can now blend everything together using a high quality blender, and we’ll get a slimy green gel that would be fit for a Halloween cocktail as well. We can now transfer this to a piping bag and let it cool, giving us some time to make the red gel. Along with ultratex you’ll need fresh strawberries, water, and citric acid–so we’re going from sweet mint to sour strawberry.

Red Strawberry Gel

● 100g Fresh Strawberries

● 20g Water

● 1.5g Citrid Acid

● 6g Ultratex

Wash the strawberries and cut away the green part. We’ll now blend the strawberries with water and citric acid until we get a nice purée. If you want the gel to be clear, like we’ll have with mint, you could clarify this with pectinex, but I don’t mind it being a bit thicker.

Now I’m adding in the Ultratex and blending again until thick and smooth. As you can see you can use Ultratex with hot or cold liquids, so it’s really easy to work with. Instead of the piping bag for this one though, I’ll put this one into a squeezer bottle, so we can show both piping techniques.

With our base clarified, gels set, and our prosecco chilled, it’s time to build Il Tricolore!

Il Tricolore

● 45mL · 1.5oz Il Tricolore Milk Punch Base

● 60g FIOL Rosé

● 2 drops 20% Saline Solution

● Green Peppermint Gel

● Red Strawberry Gel

Start with a chilled rocks glass with a tempered clear ice block, into which we’ll add the milk punch base and saline solution. To give the cocktail an Italian crown, top it up with FIOL Rosé and then turn the cocktail gently with a barspoon and that’s the white-ish part done.

Now for the green and red, place a desert spoon on top of the glass and drop two drops of gel on it, one green and one red, side-by-side. A cocktail that’s Italian in body and in color–Il Tricolore. For the full experience, I recommend consuming both of the gels first—that’s fruity, fresh, sweet, and slightly sour—and then sipping the cocktail.

The creamy texture and floral-citrus base will cleanse your palate after trying the gels, bringing it all together. This cocktail is a moment, because you’ll only get that exact flavor once, but that’s what makes it so special. I’m bringing cocktails like this to bars and events around the world, and my next stop is Madrid.

You can stay up to date with my trips by following me on Instagram, where I even post some vlogs from the recent trips I’ve been on. If you see a Mastering Bubbles workshop happening near you—come say hi, and let’s share a FIOL. And for all Friends of Cocktails here - cheers, and I’ll see you next time!