Poinsettia Champagne Cocktail Recipe – Mix That Drink

The Poinsettia drink is a champagne cocktail, which makes it ideal for holiday parties. It’s light on the alcohol, easy to drink (even for very occasional drinkers) and festive.

Orange and Cranberry Flavors

The dominant flavors here are orange and cranberry, from the Cointreau and cranberry juice. Of course you can also taste the champagne, but not as strongly as the liqueurs.

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Shopping for Key Ingredients

This cocktail simply calls for Cointreau, cranberry juice and champagne.

Cointreau

This is an orange liqueur that brightens the whole cocktail. You can use a different orange liqueur if you’d like.

Cranberry Juice

Just buy any good bottled blend of cranberry juice at the grocery store. While fresh is usually better with fruit juices, cranberry juice is so tart on its own that it has to be blended with other fruit juices to taste good in cocktails.

Champagne

While you won’t taste the champagne all that distinctly in this drink, choose a good, drinkable champagne for this cocktail. It doesn’t specify the type, but I’ve made it with a nice prosecco and with brut, and it was great either way. The prosecco adds a little more fruity sweet flavor than the brut.

There’s no need to splurge on expensive chamagne. Anything that tastes nice on its own works well in champagne cocktails.

In fact, champagne cocktails are a great way to use up leftover champagne. If you put the cork back in at the end of the night and put the bottle into the fridge, it should keep for 3-5 days.

Put Your Own Style On It

This recipe also doesn’t specify an exact amount of champagne. You pour the the three ounces of cranberry into a champagne flute, along with the half-ounce of Cointreau.

The flute glass holds a maximum of six ounces, with most bartenders only using four. So you can use as little as a half-ounce of champagne, or you could fill it all the way to the rim, which would give you two and a half ounces.

Feel free to try different ingredient ratios, depending on what flavor you want to bring out most. You can use less cranberry and more champagne, or add more Cointreau if you love the orange flavor and want more.

And if you’d like to make this drink a little stronger, just add an ounce of vodka. That won’t change the flavor profile significantly. It might dilute the flavor just a tiny bit, but this drink has plenty of flavor anyway.

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How to Enjoy

This drink is a much-loved favorite for Christmas and winter holiday parties. The cranberry taste is a winter time drink favorite, and the reddish color of the drink looks festive and beautiful.

The Poinsettia makes a great after-dinner drink for family and friend visits during the winter holidays. It’s easy to make, and it always looks elegant.

But it’s also a wonderful brunch drink for any time of the year, with the three ounces of cranberry juice and the fact that it’s not a very strong drink. You can easily enjoy this drink mid-morning, just like a Mimosa.

This is also a good drink for midday parties or office get-togethers where you don’t want anyone getting smashed. It’s classy and delicious, but light enough that most anybody can enjoy more than one without embarrassing themselves.

And if you want to make it even weaker, you can also make a non-alcoholic version. Just replace the champagne with ginger ale and replace the Cointreau with a half-ounce to an ounce of orange juice.

This non-alcoholic “mocktail version” is always a nice option to offer at parties. If you have very many guests, chances are someone won’t be drinking for one reason or another.