Sounds like a 2022 Pataille Bourgogne:
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Well @Alex_Valdes and I recently ordered Coca Colas with ice at a recent high-end Burgundy lunch.
We didn’t mix them together, but I did sip Coke betweeen trying various wines. I find it refreshing sometimes, especially if tannins are drying or I’m a bit dehydrated.
Definitely not for everyone. But I enjoy my Burgundy speedballs!
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I’ve ordered this in bars before put of curiosity. It’s not a bad drink. The fact is that there is a lot of badly made, mass-produced wine out there that is marginally improved when blended with some soft drink or other.
My wife is Hungarian and she remembers that was a popular drink when she was there at Uni around the turn of the century.
To be fair at about the same time I was mixing blue WKD with Port to make a crazy vimto. It was also mixed well with a Fino sherry.
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I do wonder how much variation there is in what wine you’d use as a base for these various mixed drinks besides “cheap.”
The German bar near me had a gluhwein they served at their annual christmas market this past year that they made with cab sauv. It really didn’t work - the tannin and the herbaceousness were really offputting in that application. But I can imagine that same cab working well with coke as a way to balance the sweetness of the cola and basically make it a kind of mint cola.
I think for the mulled wine scenario tempranillo makes a lot of sense to me, as would something like dornfelder or portugieser. I’d probably use the same as the float on a New York Sour.
For a sangria I think high acid and relatively neutral, maybe like a Beaujolais or a mencia; maybe a garnacha if you wanted more oomph.
Not wine, but two stories:
Back 16-17 years ago before I started drinking more wine, I was a scotch drinker. Was on a cross-country flight and ordered a Glen Livet scotch (not my favorite, but an adeqate single malt that was available). Lady next to me says she LOVES scotch and then proceeds to order three Dewars and milks and needs a little help getting off the plane.
About 25-30 years ago, a friend of mine went to Mexico and brought me back a bottle of Corralejo Anejo tequila. It’s common here now, but I don’t think they sold it in the U.S. back then (or at least I had never seen at store) and a $75 of tequila was pretty pricey at the time. We open it up and start sipping. My Dad comes in the room and asks what the tequila was because he thought it was great on ice cream.
To each their own . . .
Well Ben, I think that is inline with what I said then? Enjoy the wine the way the winemaker intended? (I think a fair assessment is that a wine is intended to be drunk as is, unless specified.) Not sure what you’re trying to say here.
I hear your perspective, but without taking this to the deepest end, are you saying you’re okay with any opinion as long as people enjoy it? What if someone said they enjoyed your wine but with bleach pour into it. Would you still respect that or think that isn’t right? What if they said your wine is only good if all your bottles were blended together? A horizontal mix.
Unless stated by the winemaker that their wine is intended to be a mixer, I think it is fair to assume, the wine is best enjoyed as is. The same way a painter who poured their heart into a painting, then someone purchased it to destroy its beauty, I don’t think the maker would think “oh well I respect their decision to destroy my work, because I don’t make judgements.”
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Yep, 100%.
Bleach is poisonous, so that example is kind of ridiculous, but ice cubes, Coke, whatever - it’s that person’s sensory experience, not yours, not the winemaker’s. Let alone the problems with older bottles where the winemaker is dead and you can’t ask. There are all sorts of practical and epistemological problems with trying to ensure “the wine the way the winemaker intended.” (Authorial intent is a really intro-level problem in literary studies.)
I don’t think the maker would think “oh well I respect their decision to destroy my work, because I don’t make judgements.”
The winemaker (or artist in this example) is welcome to be sad or whatever, but they sold it. There’s no objective right or wrong in choosing to destroy the painting. And there are tons of examples where some kind of defacement of a work of art is understood to itself be art.
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Couple of codger memories:
Back when China was first beginning to Rule the World, the strict fashion apparently was Chateau Lafite mixed with Coke and Chateau Latour mixed with Pepsi. Serious faux pas to mix the wrong first growth with the wrong cola.
Going back a century or two, in one of the old French cookbooks, Coq au Vin Chambertin required not just cooking the chicken with Chambertin but serving Chambertin as the wine to drink with the dish.
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I guess there is no discussion to be had then. If we leave out “deadly” mixers, but if you and I were out to dinner and you suddenly took your chicken parm and started dunking it into your brunello because it is how you enjoy it, like a doughnut dunked into coffee, idk man, I’d say you’re doing it wrong and I probably wouldn’t go to an Italian place with you again. Or, especially would not respect or consider that you’re drinking brunello the right way.
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Fernet and Coca Cola is the national drink of Argentina. Fernet is an amaro made on a base of grape spirits, so sorta close. Probably goes good with cigars.
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I don’t get the sense that I would particularly enjoy going out to dinner with you anyway based on what you’ve said in this thread, but que sera sera. There’s a reason why “in matters of taste there is no dispute” is a cliche.
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What you need to do is dunk your cigar in your Brunello, let it sit there for half an hour, then take it out, douse it in Everclear to remove the soggy component, and relight it. Then enjoy the rest of your Brunello, with its flavors enhanced by the tobacco notes.
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In Germany, not uncommon to mix riesling with selzer or soda.
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How about Romanée-Conti and Coke? It’s not as uncommon as you might think in China.
Dry reisling? Or off dry to sweet?
Some wider thoughts, many already expressed in this discussion
- If you’ve bought the wine, it’s absolutely up to you what you do with it.
- We’re wine geeks, we obsess about vintages, producers, grapes and vineyards. On that basis, no surprise to see some disquiet at obscuring that by blending the wine with other flavours, that may obscure the nuance we care about.
Some of us square that by saying if you don’t geekily care about that wine, then blend away. All is good.
If however you say you geekily care about the wine, then blend in a masking agent like coke/pepsi, we might believe you care more about the label than the wine.
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I’d add that, with the wines that are usually used for these sorts of spritzer adjacent things, the entire concept of “the winemaker’s intent” is sort of a category error. We’re talking about commodity grade bulk wine from the sort of vines that the European governments are paying farmers to rip out.
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I’ve been doing home blending forever, but not quite the same thing.
I’ve been known to let red Bourgognes pick up a little too much age. I’ve been known to ‘freshen them up’ with a drop of something younger, maybe from Oregon.
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