We had a bottle of highly mediocre sparkling wine chilling in the fridge from our recent move. I wanted to experiment with some of the cocktails that use wine, and the French 76 sounded like a good place to start.

It combines liquor with wine, as well as a dash of tartness and sweetness. It seemed plausible as well as fairly easy, so I gave it the ol’ college try. Which is technically a misnomer, as I never worked this hard at drinking in college.

3/4 oz vodka
1/4 oz lemon juice
dash grenadine
dash simple syrup
sparkling wine

Shake the vodka, lemon juice, grenadine and simple syrup and strain into a champagne flute. Fill glass with champagne and serve.

This tasted exactly how I expected it to, lightly sweet and tangy, though the quality of the champagne is terribly important. The champagne I used had entirely too much of a “wine” flavor, which distracted from the other flavors.

I’ll definitely give this one another try with a different type of wine.