Woo Woo

The iconic 1980s fruity cocktail that defined a generation of party drinks. Vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice create a sweet-tart, easy-drinking classic that's still beloved today.

The Woo Woo emerged in the 1980s as part of the peach schnapps revolution triggered by DeKuyper's 1984 launch of its Peach Schnapps expression — a product whose commercial success was so immediate and unexpected that it generated $80 million in sales within its first year and demonstrated that sweet, fruit-flavored spirits had a mass American market. The Woo Woo's formula is deliberately simple: vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice in roughly equal parts, shaken and served over ice or strained into a glass. The drink belongs to the same structural family as Sex on the Beach — which adds orange juice to the same three-ingredient base — and the two cocktails are near-siblings, the Woo Woo distinguished primarily by the absence of the orange juice component, making it slightly more tart and more deeply cranberry-colored. Cranberry juice had been elevated from a specialized New England agricultural product to a national beverage staple by Ocean Spray's cooperative marketing campaigns from the 1940s onward, and by the 1980s its combination with flavored spirits was established across a range of well-known drinks. The name belongs to the tradition of playfully expressive cocktail naming that characterized 1980s and 1990s bar culture, where the act of ordering was understood to be part of the social entertainment of an evening out — a name that requires no explanation and communicates an attitude of uncomplicated fun.