Saint Barb’s Blast

Bubbly ’n’ Bourbon

Presuming one might concoct a “new” cocktail always makes me think of the great quote from musical oddballs Ween, and I paraphrase: “It’s like when you wake up from a dream with a brilliant song, you write it down, and then in the morning you realize you just wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama.'”

The classics are classics for a reason, and if you wander too far from them you just end up with weirdness for novelty’s sake.

But, of course, you can also take a classic and give it a local spin—that’s what the Drinkable Landscape is all about. Think of this edition as the Santa Barbara Seelbach Cocktail, a sparkling wine drink perfect for the holidays and moved from its Louisville origins to our own backyard.

Named after the Seelbach Hotel, so swank it hosted guests like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Al Capone, this cocktail has a wonderful, mythical provenance: Supposedly it was born when a bartender caught a spewing, just-opened champagne bottle’s spray in a customer’s Manhattan. Think of it as a very adult “you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” moment.

The drink was lost during Prohibition and rediscovered in the 1990s with the first wave of interest in bitters, which help drive this drink.

To do it traditionally, you should use a Kentucky bourbon (Old Forester, to be precise). But now in Santa Barbara we have our own, so why not use Ascendant Spirits’ Breaker Bourbon? Plus, thanks to Riverbench Vineyard & Winery, we can do something Kentuckians can’t—make the drink with a sparkling wine from our very own county. (I’d suggest Ian Cutler’s 33 Straight Bourbon for the drink, since his distillery is in the Funk Zone right next door to the Riverbench’s tasting room— we could almost pretend the two could get accidentally spilled into each other—but his first batch sold out, alas.)

Clarissa Nagy, Riverbench’s winemaker, creates three sparklers, and they are fine to drink on their own, really too good for the purposes of mixology. But this is the holidays, and that means we want to impress, to use the best ingredients, to celebrate. Riverbench Cork Jumper Blanc de Blancs, made 100% from Chardonnay grapes, is the first sustainable sparkling wine in the county (thanks to the brilliant Sustainability in Practice program). This sparkling wine is luscious and rich, a pleasing cross of lemon and apple and that lovely bready yeast flavor you want in a wine made using méthode champenoise.

You will have to purchase it directly from the winery, but can do so online or at the tasting room. Showing up in person also gives you the option of tasting your way through the full line of Riverbench wines, both still and sparkling. So that’s about as fun a shopping trip as you can have.

You might, of course, wonder why a sparkling wine needs to be gussied up in the first place. A Saint Barb’s Blast (Sta. Barbara is the patron saint of gunpowder, after all) is about celebration, elevation, showmanship. The bourbon and Cointreau expand the wine’s flavor profiles—you’ll start picking up a nuttiness, for instance, plus some oak and more citrus.

Then the bitters add all sorts of grace notes, and the Peychaud’s (a crucial feature in the New Orleans’ staple the Sazerac—so you want some in your bar), helps make the drink a blushing bronze that seems fitting for the season. I have cut the alcohol amounts a tiny bit, as this drink can seem a bit too pungent in its typical ratios. Plus it’s not like you’re trying to hide budget bubbly, either.

Then there are the garnishes, possibly two if you want to be extravagant. It’s winter, so, unlike people in Louisville, we can probably pick an orange off one of our own trees. You need a twist zester to make the strips easily, but this handy tool is relatively cheap at a good cooking store. That little orange line along the glass again adds more citrus zip, but more than anything it’s beautiful.

Feel free to include a few pomegranate seeds, too. They are a typical champagne cocktail accoutrement, if not for this particular drink. Still, you might have pomegranates in your yard, so if you have the seeds, drop them in, pretty and pungent as they are. (You do know the trick of excavating the seeds from the fruit in a bowl of water, so as to avoid making a bloody red mess?)