Wine Spritzers Go from Wimpy to Wow

No Comments | Written on August 23, 2012 at 1:00 pm, by Lesley Kennedy

Planning an end-of-summer bash and not sure about the drink menu? There’s sangria — but that’s so 2010. Mojitos are nice, but kind of a pain (all that muddling). Beer? Boring. Wait! We have two words: wine spritzer.

Now before you roll your eyes and tell us how positively wimpy and retro that idea is (somehow we picture Miles on Murphy Brown), we should let you know that the New York Post is calling a comeback for the cocktail that adds one part seltzer to two parts wine.

Light, refreshing, fruity — and it’s still wine, people!

“I’m totally pro-spritzer,” Eduard Frauneder, the owner and chef of New York City’s Edi & the Wolf, tells the newspaper. “They’re very versatile . . . very clean, very food-friendly. … They’re less alcoholic, and you drink less, which is always a good thing.”

Amen, brother.

And, of course, bartenders are spritzing up their spritzers by using “exotic sodas and garnishes,” according to the Post. At Edi & the Wolf, you’ll find white wine poured with soda water, elderflower syrup, mint, lemon and, for a little extra pizzazz, two dehydrated roses. At New York’s Bourgeois Pig, spritzers are even on tap — think “sauvignon blanc and simple syrup mixed with either orange peel, hibiscus and ginger soda or grapefruit, jalapeño and honey soda.”

“You think of old ladies drinking them,” Bourgeois Pig owner Ravi DeRossi tells the Post. “My mom drank them when I was a kid. But that’s why I like them. Because they’re sort of nostalgic and my mom would give me sips when I was 12.”

So, sure, chefs and hipsters may be happy to sing the praises of a nice white wine spritzer, but will “real men” imbibe? The Post says, yes, at least in the Big Apple. As for the rest of the country, we’ll have to wait and see. But as the newspaper points out, the old Ned Flanders quote from The Simpsons offers a clue: “I’ll have a Shirley . . . No, a virgin . . . No, a children’s . . . Oh, what the heck? You only live once. Give me a white-wine spritzer!”