Make House Wine Taste Better With Soda Water

My customary drink of choice is a very ordinary dry white, mixed just stronger than 50/50 with lime seltzer (or club soda). I'd call it a spritzer, if I didn't think people would think I was referring to some god-awful sweetened nastiness.

I likes it cause I tends ta guzzle.

@[www.bakonvodka.com]

@sean000: We do have great wines - but we also have some mediocre-but-cheap ones. Hence the soda mix. It's an age-old tradition, and a controversial one too. You'll never find vino con soda in a classy restaurant (which is not the same as a good restaurant: there are great classless restaurants)

Alejandro

@wickedcupofjoe: see above

This is how Argentinians have table wine with every meal. My family is Argentinian and I can tell you guys that this is perfectly acceptable there and "authentic" in its own right.

Note: fancy Argentinian wines are not necessarily prepared this way.

So, wine and soda being such a popular drink, it is common to see one or more soda siphons in every proper home. I'm in the USA, so I have to settle for my own homemade soda water not in a siphon.

The soda siphon is one of the standard Argentinian things to have around the house. So you have the big fat wine bottle and the soda siphon. Follow that up after dinner with some coffee (at about 10 or 11pm) with some pastries or bread. In your field of vision is a setup for yerba mate (kettle, container for the yerba and sugar, the mate, the bombilla).

Again, this is how things are done. So if you wine snobs want to get your geek rage on, put it away - this is how things are done in Argentina, where many of your wine snob wines come from.

redteam

@Guvmint_Cheese: Chuck Norris jokes will roundhouse kick the bacon memes out of existence.

Azadeh is a bit of a boozehound.

Michael C Taylor

@teleny: Oh, yes. Forgot. Oscar was drinking a H&S when he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel, at least according to legend. The bobby let him finish the bottle.

teleny

LOL! It's a wine spritzer! Very popular in the South on hot summer days. Sangria is another popular way to utilize bad wine, but sometimes that just makes bad sangria.

It's surprising that in Argentina it would be the norm to serve house wine as a spritzer. After all the Argentine's make some nice wines, so you'd think decent house wine would be widely available... but the author might have been pretty far from the Argentine wine country. Or perhaps the Argentines just stumbled onto this as something to do with bad wines, and the spritzer became a popular drink because of that.

I worked in restaurants for a number of years, and I remember a woman who came into one restaurant semi-regularly and always asked for a drink that one of our bartenders flat-out refused to make: Red wine with orange juice. I made it for her once and poured myself a shot glass full of the concoction. I thought it might be sort of Sangria-like, but I found it to be pretty nasty.

I've never been a huge fan of wine spritzers, but nothing against them if its a hot sweaty day. I prefer the refreshment of a beer, gin & tonic, margarita, or crisp white wine. Beer is all-weather to me, but if it's cool enough I'll take a glass of good red wine over a spritzer. The nice thing about living in Washington state is that the house wine at many restaurants is often excellent and often local.

sean000

I don't know why anyone is taking umbrage: Oscar Wilde's favorite drink (even more than absinthe!) was a comparatively tame mixture of Reisling and soda water (known to most barkeeps of the day as "Hock and seltzer"). It was light, slightly sweet, and possibly made Victorian tap water less deadly.

M'self, I've been known to pour water (sparkling or still) into various forms of plonk, or even to ask for a wedge of lemon, or even a lime or orange (great with red), if I feel like it needs it.

Mind you, this is not for the 1945 Bordeaux that the host inherited from his granddaddy, or for the $1000 small-batch winery bottle, but for your garden-variety Almaden or Gallo kinds of wine. For Tisdale, or Two-Buck Chuck, there's really nothing you can do, except go the whole Sangria route with it, which is a whole 'nother ball game...

teleny

A better way of making old wine more palatable is to pur it over clingfilm/saran wrap into a decanter/large glass and drink from tere. the long chain polymers of the film ( polythene to be precise ) bind to 2,4,6-trichloranisole ( the chemical that makes wine smell musty/old - abbreviated to TCA ) and , for a better word , refreshes it.

Alexis Vassilakas

As others have said, this is a wine spritzer. However, I thought the point of this mix was to allow one to be able to enjoy wine without getting too tipsy too quickly. For this reason, the drink has been most popular with women (like myself!).

Alice Arrington Radley

Here's a real hack to make bad wine taste better:

If you happen to open a bottle and it's corked, you can use saran wrap to get the nasty chemicals that make the wine taste bad out of the wne, thus saving your expensive bottle of corked chablis! just scrunch up a bunch of plastic wrap in a glass (for more surface area) and pour the wine over it. Wait 10 minutes and decant.

dotdotdotdotdot

@jigwashere: I just can't wait until the bacon meme goes the way of Chuck Norris jokes.

Guvmint_Cheese

@jigwashere: Yes. First, add bacon.

Umm...I don't want to do anything to any of my drink that adds "spunk" to it...

It's actually not bad, and it's not weird in many parts of the world. You can order this type of (usually white) wine sprizter in western Europe, including France and Italy. It bears no resemblance to the pre-packaged, very sweet or fruity flavoured wine sprizters you buy in the supermarket.

It's an excellent way to use up a bottle of wine that you've bought to try and just aren't all that fond of. I wouldn't recommend using this trick on a terrible bottle of wine (it won't make it that much better), but if you've purchased a £7-10 bottle that just isn't to your fancy, it's a good solution.

I love wine and I don't see how this is any more blasphemous than French kir.

NotMandatory

In Hungary, this is called fröccs. The most popular mixture is with rosé, but the same trick applies to any variety.

I'd urge caution with the mixture though if you plan on driving. Part of the appeal of fröccs and spritzers is, thanks to the carbonation, it gets you drunk more quickly than the wine alone, so it has the potential to sneak up on you.

"How to make good soda water taste like bad wine."

Yikes, do what @Zuzax said.

Or better yet, if you look around the room and see soda water with all the wine, don't order the wine in the first place.

Bad wine in Argentina? Do they import their wine from Texas or something? Most wine from Argentina is just fine.

robdew

@Areia: Or Bacon Salt...

@Yes.

Areia

Wasn't that Ned Flanders' drink of choice?

"Here's how"? As if this were some magical secret that hasn't been around since the 1960s? Come on. Hats off to the very first comment.

Sean Masters

Throw away bad wine. It's just better for everyone involved.

In Spanish its called a Calimocho. Very common throughout Latin America and Spain. It is very common for younger crowds to buy a box of wine and mix it with coke or sprite with red and white respectively (usually 50/50). In fact, I do it now whenever I end up with a wine I truly do not enjoy. I never had it with ice though and I probably won't. Ice consequently dilutes and is therefore my enemy.

Also of note, more often than not, chilling a bottle of wine for 10-15 minutes in the fridge before it is served can turn a bad wine into a palatable one.

speaknspell23

@wickedcupofjoe:

This is similar to what they do in spain with cheap red wine. If you add coke, its called a Kalimotxo. This probably has the same effect without the sweet coke taste. By the way, if I have to drink cheap box wine or something, I add coke and ice, and its not bad.

Joe Dowdell

@jigwashere: LOL Win :D

@jigwashere: and lemons, oranges, a splash of brandy... I like a good sangria.

This is similar to what they do in spain with cheap red wine. If you add coke, its called a Kalimotxo. This probably has the same effect without the sweet coke taste. By the way, if I have to drink cheap box wine or something, I add coke and ice, and its not bad.

DaleRabbit

Just representing for the die-hard wine aficionados -- while this isn't a bad hack, per se, it's not making wine taste better. It's making wine taste like a different beverage entirely.

As has been pointed out, this makes a wine spritzer, not better-tasting wine.

@jigwashere: yeah, and cinnamon, lemon peels and some peach bits... and have it in the beach if possible

rafasan

@mfusion: If it's white wine, you can also add seven up and have a "rebujito"... sort of (it's that, but it has to have a specific kind of white wine). If it's red you can make sangria, "tinto de verano" (adding some lemon soda, or "calimocho" with coke... we do that a lot in spain... buy cheap wine and mix it with soda

rafasan

I did this with some cranberry wine that I made once that came out far too sweet for my liking. Cutting it with lime seltzer water (50 / 50) and a couple ice cubes was just the trick.

Matthew Pettengill

...wait. Is there a way to make old wine taste like bacon?

jigwashere

Might as well add a cup of sugar, too.

jigwashere

I'm not a wine drinker other than an occasional glass if I go out with friends (which in itself is rare) but isn't this also referred to as a wine spritzer? I think I had something like this quite a few years back, sans ice. Of course I think the wine came from a box, lol.

It is a neat hack to make bad wine better though! And I've never had it with red wine - that sounds interesting.

@mfusion: for the record, that's how you get a "first" comment without getting hit with the banhammer.

it's called a spritzer.
the first time i saw it referenced was in a book Shall We Tell The President

"white wine and soda, sort of like a poor man's James Bond"

Second-, third-, or fourth-ing the "spritzer" identification.

In the summer, I like to mix equal parts Blue Sky Pomegranate soda, Topo Chico sparkling water, and a dirt-cheap cab over ice. A crushed fresh mint or basil leaf is nice when available. It's called a "wine cooler" - what we did before Bartles and James ruined it for an entire generation.

Keter

@jigwashere: Ask Wine.Woot, I'm sure they can come up with something...

Keter

@Zuzax: Awesome. Well, then it's only logical that both the squeeze bacon and the bacon-flavored vodka will be added to the wine. All will be right with the world!

@Matthew Pettengill: My nephew did the same with homemade cherry wine that was way too sweet. 50:50 with Squirt (for those unfamiliar, grapefruit based soda pop) and it was real good.

Cybrczch

Here's how we do it in Romania:
Red wine: no soda, whatsoever. If it awfully dry (awfully means good), have a glass of soda nearby.

White wine: dry wine and extra sweet wine goes with mineral soda. But: you have to avoid really saline or mineral tasting brands, blander water mix better. We really have little "pure" soda around, the majority is carbonated mineral water.

Depending on the outside temperature, the quality of wine and the food served, the proportion varies from 1/8 to 1/2 soda to wine.

Never mix an expensive wine with soda. We always choose medium quality or "home brewed" wine to go with soda. It's not like "home" wine is inferior, I've never tasted a commercial wine better than the best of the home product, but it's somehow a heavier treat. You don't get finesse, but a lot of flavor, taste and kick. Kind of like unfiltered beer compared to Carlsberg.

So:
red wine: never mix
expensive wine: never mix
sweet white wine: only if it's so sweet you can't stand it
dry white wine: if you wish, mix as you like, better cold than warm, better kept cold than with ice on the glass

randomset

As many have said before, this is a wine spritzer. My wife and mother-in-law do this all the time with White Zin. However, they use the flavored slightly carbonated waters to add a little more zing to it. They particularly like the black cherry and white grape when added to white zin.

More importantly, is there a way to make water taste like bacon? o_O

Ardwiz

I remember a lifetime ago being given Mineral water & wine when in Italy - a way of letting children drink wine with their meals (avoiding the whole "Forbidden fruit" aspect).

UmitMacGuyver

Common drink in Croatia is ''gemišt'' which is a cocktail of white wine and carbonated mineral water (which taste similar to soda water). Of course, mixing some high end wines with mineral water would be a kind of insolent sacrilege toward that wine and its producer...
However, some high-scale industrial but still fine table white wines containing slightly higher level of acid are just appropriate for that.
It is not a way to refine bad tasting wine, as bad tasting wines worth for nothing.