We have two recipes for you today, perfect timing for the weekend! Try our Sutter Home White Zinfandel Brownies & our newest wine cocktail: Pink Sweetness. Have some friends over this weekend & serve them one or both of these delicious treats!

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Sutter Home Pink Sweetness

-2 oz. Sutter Home White Zinfandel
-2 oz. Sutter Home Sweet White
-1 oz. sparkling water
-1 tbsp. grenadine

Add Sutter Home White Zinfandel & Sutter Home Sweet White to your favorite cocktail glass (daiquiri glass used here) over ice. Stir with a bar spoon. Add grenadine & sparkling water. Garnish with a strawberry.

PAIR WITH: Spicy pasta (recipe from Real Simple) with chicken or our Sutter Home White Zinfandel Brownies – recipe below!

(Don’t forget to enter your original cocktail into our contest!

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Sutter Home White Zinfandel Brownies

Ingredients
-1/2 cup butter
-1 cup white sugar
-2 eggs
-1 teaspoon vanilla extract
-1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
-1/2 cup all-purpose flour
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-1/4 teaspoon baking powder
-1/3 cup Sutter Home White Zinfandel

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour an 8 inch square pan. In a large saucepan, melt butter. Remove from heat and stir in sugar, eggs, vanilla & Sutter Home White Zinfandel. Beat in cocoa, flour, salt, and baking powder. Spread batter into prepared pan. Bake in preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Do not overcook.

Here’s today’s Sutter Home wine cocktail! Enter your unique wine cocktail into our contest for a chance to win…

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Sippin’ Pretty
4 oz. Sutter Home Sweet White
1 oz. sparkling water
3 slices of tangerine or mandarin
Chill Sutter Home Sweet White. Add wine & tangerine slices to your favorite glass and top with sparkling water. Add ice if preferred.

Happy Monday, everyone! We hope you tried the Pinkatini this weekend – if you did, let us know how you liked it! Need inspiration for making some Sutter Home wine cocktails? We have new photography of some of our cocktails and an easy recipe to try. Once you have your original wine cocktail, enter it into our contest! You could win a $250 Crate & Barrel gift card. Need more inspiration? Check out all of our wine cocktails!

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Sutter Home Orange Dream
3 oz. Sutter Home Bubbly Moscato
1 oz. Orange soda
Garnish with an orange wheel

Tap your inner mixologist & have some fun making wine cocktails! They’re easy to make, fun to practice making and you can use anything that you love to drink. You can enter your final creation into our Facebook contest! Make your practicing even more fun – invite some friends over & make a party out of it!

1. Gather your bar tools, like a shaker, muddler, strainer & jigger. Learn about which bar tools are the best to have on hand.

2. Pick your favorite mixers. Some suggestions would be sparkling fruit sodas, sparkling water, sweet & sour mix, juices, sodas and anything else you love! Learn more.

3. Choose garnishes. You can get really creative with these – think of anything you’d see on a spirits cocktail and also anything you like! Lemons, limes, strawberries, cranberries, candy, herbs – the options are endless. Learn more.

4. Have some sugar on hand. You may want to sweeten up your drink or sugar the rim of your glass. Either way, have some sugar on hand to try out new things!

5. Buy the wine! Choose all different types of Sutter Home wines to make all different kinds of wine cocktails. Tip: buy 187ml mini bottles so you can try all different kinds easily! Pop them in the refrigerator for easy grab & go.

6. Lots & lots of ice. You’ll need a lot of ice to shake up your cocktails.

7. Create your invite. Use a free service like Evite to email to your friends or dare to be different & send physical invitations! Order some cocktail party invitations online or find some at your local card store. You could even cut paper into the shape of a martini glass & create your own! Your friends will love them.

8. Set the table & counter. Put out all of your glassware (martini glasses, pint glasses, brandy snifters, shot glasses, wine glasses, champagne flutes, highball glasses, rocks glasses, daiquiri glasses…) for your friends to choose from. Sprinkle some cocktail-themed confetti on the table. Have a separate area for wine & mixers, garnishes, ice & glassware. Have bar tools easily accessible.

9. Encourage everyone to try new concoctions! Like we’ve said before, we tried some cocktails that really didn’t work, so we dumped it out and tried again. Have fun with it! If you like all the flavors you put in the glass, you’ll probably love the result.

10. Grab your camera! Capture the party to relive the fun later. Post your pics on our Facebook page – we’d love to see them!

11. Record the cocktail recipes as you go along so that you can enter them into our contest! You could win a $250 gift card for Crate & Barrel – perfect to get all those cool bar tools you’ve always wanted.

Have a great time & let us know how it goes!

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Inspiration Cocktail: Pinkatini

Since we announced our Bubbly Pink Moscato yesterday, we’ve made a delicious cocktail for when you can get your hands on this wine. We *also* made new cocktails for each Moscato we carry – our sparkling collection of Moscato cocktails! CHEERS!

This sweet cocktail is perfect for your sweetheart – bubbly Moscato & dessert, all in one! Thank you to Donna-Marie from MA for such an interesting & creative wine cocktail recipe – perfect for Valentine’s Day.

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Strawberry Cheesecake Bubbly for Two
~1/2 cup fresh strawberries, cleaned and sliced
~6 ounces Sutter Home Bubbly Moscato
~3 tablespoons prepared cheesecake pie filling
(found in refrigerator dairy section of food store)

Take the strawberries and puree in a small blender or mini processor. Fill heart shaped ice cube trays with puree. Freeze.

When ready to serve  place 3 oz. of Sutter Home Bubbly Moscato in each of two champagne flutes.

Top with 1½ tablespoons of prepared cheesecake filling and a single frozen strawberry heart! Serves 2

Thanks to our fan, Heather W., we have a wine cocktail that sweeps us away on vacation. Congrats to Heather – this wine cocktail is definitely worthy to be the Sutter Home Wine Cocktail of the Week!

If you have a cocktail you want to enter into our contest, visit our Facebook page to enter. Good luck to all and cheers!

Last week, we launched the Sutter Home Wine Cocktail of the Week (COTW)! We’re choosing delicious recipes from the entries into our cocktail contest on our Facebook page. Each week, we’re featuring a fan recipe that gets its own Facebook status update, blog post & even gets added to our profile pic for that week! You could be famous – enter now! Follow us on Twitter too – @sutterhome & #SHCOTW.

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COTW – January 26, 2012
Moscato Pucker Up
-3 oz. Sutter Home Moscato
-1 oz. watermelon liqueur
-1 oz. seltzer water
Combine ingredients together, adding seltzer to your preference of taste.
Cocktail submitted by: Karen O. from Ohio

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COTW – February 2, 2012 (Happy Groundhog Day!)
Southern Belle Cosmo
-Sutter Home Pinot Grigio
-Triple Sec
-Cranberry juice
-Limes
Mix 2 parts Pinot Grigio to one part triple sec combined with one part cranberry and the juice of half a lime.
The cranberry mainly adds colour and should not excessively dilute the drink.
Cocktail submitted by: Tracy E. from Mississippi

Month 1 of our Sutter Home Wine Cocktail Contest has ended but we have fun news: it’s a monthly contest! Every month we’ll be picking a winning cocktail! We’re also going to start featuring a fan cocktail each week on our Facebook page so head on over there for new cocktail ideas.

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Orange Sutter Home-sicle
-2 oz. Sutter Home Bubbly Moscato
-1 oz. white rum
-3 oz. orange cream mixer
Pour ingredients over ice & mix with bar spoon. Cheers!

Cheers to the weekend! We’re thinking you may need a couple of fun & easy recipes for your football parties this weekend. Who are you rooting for?

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Pom-Merlot Fusion
-4 oz. Sutter Home Merlot
-2 oz. sparkling pomegranate-blueberry juice
-Sugar rim
-Garnish with lime
Take a salad plate and add a small amount of water. Take another plate and add a thin layer of fine sugar. Dip the rim of your glass in the water, then roll the rim of the glass around in the sugar. Add ice, Sutter Home Merlot, sparkling pomegranate-blueberry juice. Garnish with a slice of lime & enjoy!

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Shredded Chicken Sliders
-4 frozen chicken breasts
-1/2 bottle of Sutter Home Merlot (750ml)
-2/3 bottle of your favorite BBQ sauce
-Shredded cabbage & carrots for coleslaw
-Kings Hawaiian small buns

Chicken
Add chicken, Merlot & BBQ sauce to slow cooker. Set to high for 4 hours or low for 8. Chicken should fall apart when done. Slice King Hawaiian buns in half, lightly toast in the oven. Add more BBQ sauce to chicken as needed.

Coleslaw
Mix shredded cabbage & carrots with small amount of mayo. Use chipotle mayo for a kick!

Finish it up
Top bun with shredded BBQ chicken & small amount of coleslaw on top. Serve with Pom-Merlot Fusion cocktail & enjoy! (The messier the better!)