Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Kalimotxo!

Because lowbrow sangria is just plain awesome.

There’s no such thing as a small glass of sangria.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. True confession: I love sangria. Specifically, I love cheap, premade, not-very-nice sangria — the stuff that tastes like alcoholic Kool-Aid. I’ve killed more than a few bottles of this stuff with my wife on late summer nights. Fond memories make cheap booze taste delightful. But this version of sangria takes “cheap” to a whole new level. Bottom-shelf red wine and Coca-Cola? Sign me up. Let’s make a pitcher of Kalimoxto. Here’s the recipe:

Kalimotxo

1 liter Coca-Cola

4 cups Lindeman’s Cabernet Sauvignon (or whatever you’ve got)

½ cup Korbel brandy

1 orange

1 lime

Wash the orange and lime in hot water. Dry them roughly with a towel, to remove any food safe wax. Peel the fruits, preferably in one large peel. Add the juice of the fruit, the peels, and everything else to a pitcher. Add lots of ice and stir well.

True confession: I rarely finish a bottle of wine. I’ll buy a bottle of something drinkable for cooking and somehow neglect to drink the rest of it before it starts turning to vinegar. This recipe dates to Basque country circa 1972, when some festival goers realized that the wine they’d brought for the party was less than great. They added cola and fruit juice to salvage the booze, and a new party staple was created. The drink was named after two of their fellow partiers — “Kalimero” and “Motxo” — and the American cocktail scene would be so much better if we named party drinks after our friends instead of sexual innuendos. (Looking at you, Sex on the Beach.)

Sangria has never had what you’d call a distinguished pedigree. Ostensibly Spanish, it took off as an American cocktail after it was handed out at the Spanish kiosk at the 1964 World’s Fair. In all fairness, people have been tossing sugar and fruit juice into lousy wine since wine was invented. Normally I’d be making some simple syrup and adding more juice to make “real” sangria, but who wants to turn on the stove in this heat? Sweet cola does the trick just fine.

As we get closer to my summer vacation, I’m looking for pitcher cocktails to share with my campmates at Pennsic. This cocktail hits all the sweet spots for a good pitcher drink for summer — low effort, not terribly alcoholic, and inexpensive ingredients. Simply scaling up a standard cocktail recipe by a factor of six will probably work okay, but there are other elements at work. The cocktail will be sitting in a pitcher of ice for some time. Inevitably, it will be diluted by the time that your guests drink it. That’s not a bad thing, really; a pitcher drink shouldn’t be as strong as a standard cocktail. Guests will be drinking them in the hot sun, and will probably imbibe more than they normally would. I lean heavily on mixers to stretch out summer pitcher drinks, going as far as adding some Topo Chico to my standard margarita recipe.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. This is like $20 of stuff for a full pitcher of tasty booze, you’ve got no excuse.

Coca-Cola: If you hunt, it’s not too hard to find 1 liter bottles of your favorite soda. In the worst case, eyeball half of a standard 2-liter jug. I would be slightly stingy with the soda; the original recipe for this was closer to a 1:1 ratio of wine to soda. Feel free to experiment with the pop of your choice. Ginger ale and white wine sounds pretty good to me. Avoid cherry cola or other “flavored” soda; artificial and natural fruit flavors in the same glass rarely work well. For the love of my diabetic daughter, I made a pitcher of this with Coke Zero. It’s shockingly good.  

Cheap Red Wine: I tossed in a bottle of Dark Horse Cabernet Sauvignon that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for the past month, rounded out with a $5 bottle of Lindemans red wine. I’m really surprised at how well they turned out in the glass. The bitter tannins and the punchy, simple fruit flavors in the cheap red are harsh on their own, but stand up against the unctuous soda just enough to be noticed. The original recipe kept the measurements stupid simple — one bottle of red wine, one liter of pop. I thought that wasn’t quite sweet or fizzy enough, but find your own favorite ratio. 

Orange and Lime Juice: Fresh is best, especially here. Peeling the fruit brings more citrus oil into the pitcher as time goes on; it’s a little work but worth it. The key to cutting a long peel of citrus is to keep the peeler stationary in your hand and move the fruit under the peeler. Can’t make one long peel? Just toss in what you can. No judgments. The long peels just make cleanup easier later. 

Korbel Brandy: You get what you pay for when you’re buying brandy, and this sub-$20 bottle of brandy is no exception. I used this for a sweet blackberry Old Fashioned a while back, and it’s pretty much undrinkable unless you bury it under fruit flavors. It’s perfect here. Use better stuff if you actually like brandy in places other than sangria. 

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!  

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