A bright, easygoing highball where vodka gives the backbone, peach schnapps lays down a soft, candied stone-fruit sweetness, and cranberry juice cuts through it with a tart, ruby-red edge. Poured long over plenty of ice and sharpened with a squeeze of lime, it drinks sweet-tart, cold and unabashedly fruity — light enough to disappear before you notice.
Garnish: Lime Wedge
Built · Highball · On the Rocks
build
Fill a highball glass with cubed ice.
add
Add the vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice directly to the glass.
stir
Stir briefly to combine and chill.
garnish
Garnish with a lime wedge.
The Woo Woo turned up in American bars during the 1980s, when peach schnapps was suddenly behind every counter, and it travelled in the same company as the Fuzzy Navel. By March 1988 William Grimes, writing in Esquire, could report that the drink was "very big on the East Coast." No bartender or bar holds a documented claim to it — it spread with a broad trend rather than from any one source. It belongs to a family of cranberry-and-vodka highballs that includes the Cape Codder, Sea Breeze and Sex on the Beach, and an equal-parts shooter version answers to the name baby Woo Woo.