The Leftovers: Wine the Day After
Now is a fine time to use all those terrible bottles sitting in the back of your fridge
These days, I find myself scrounging through the fridge to use every scrap of food before making a grocery run. It reminds me of Depression-era stories about Americans saving pieces of paper, using bars of soap down to the last nub, and reusing tin foil. Though I can’t say if we’re facing an economic depression or not, I know that many of us will have to make choices on what is a luxury these days — and those luxuries may have been quotidian yesterday. For instance, unless you’re a wine writer like Jancis Robinson, whose cellar is stocked for six years after the apocalypse, you might have to raid the back of your fridge for wine.
Fortunately, there are many instances where I’ve purposely sequestered wine to the back of the fridge. Despite my expertise, I still have friends who insist on bringing me bottles of wine, purchased from the grocery store, with footprints and fauna on the labels. Then there’s just the plonk that gets sampled between my fiancée, also a beverage professional, and myself. We might not throw the wine away — that would be poor form — but we do stick it somewhere out of everyday reach. And often I’m glad we did. It turns out there’s a lot you can do with bad wine. By mixing it with fruit, spirits, and sugar, you can add the flavors and structure you want.
I remember an oddball riesling I was given that was clearly designed for people who order riesling with no other qualification (meaning a slightly sweet white wine). It was strangely viscous with little flavor apart from delicate stone fruit and melon. I decided to accentuate the flavors, build some backbone, and add a touch of tartness. I scooped melon balls and froze them to use as ice cubes, added some Cointreau, lemon juice and honey syrup. The result was both delicious and easy to make.
Melon Punch
serves 4–6 people (or less in this time of social distancing)
25 ounces Any Random White Wine
4 ounces Cointreau
2 ounces lemon juice
2 ounces honey syrup (or to taste)
Use frozen melon balls in place of ice (watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew will all work)
Of course, it helps to know where to begin. Not everyone has Cointreau, citrus, and multicolored melons on hand, or such a background in mixology. And every wine is a little different, from cheap New Zealand sauvignon blanc that tastes like jalapeño water to pungently plummy coastal zinfandel. But there are some formulas that work again and again.
I’ll start with a broad recipe for Sangria, a wine drink we all know and occasionally — say, at a Spanish restaurant or on vacation — enjoy. You can use white or red wine. Though most people prefer red. (As you can see above, my melon punch is really just a version of white wine sangria.) To the wine, I adjust the sweetness with simple syrup, equal parts sugar and water. Add a little orange juice and toss in any chopped fruit I have on-hand. Add the ingredients for thirty minutes, toss in some ice cubes, top with soda water, and enjoy.
There’s another drink you can make with bad red wines, and sweet fortified wines like Port or Madeira, that sounds suspiciously close to Sangria. It’s called the Sangaree. They sound related, but they’re not. Or at least not by category. They come from the same root word: sangre, a Spanish word meaning blood. The Sangaree appears in the late 18th century where Sangria didn’t make the stage until the 20th century.
For a Sangaree: Pour three ounces of red or fortified wine into a glass, then add a half-ounce simple syrup, an ounce of brandy or curaçao, and grate nutmeg over the top. Pre-ground nutmeg isn’t as good, but works in a quarantine. Add ice and stir. Cracked ice is best, and you can always add a dash of lemon juice if you think it’s too sweet, especially for sweeter wines like Port or Madeira.
This next one is even easier than the other two and has classic cocktail bonafides. It’s called the Champagne Cocktail. Most of us have been gifted some cheap bottle of bubbles that bears little resemblance to Champagne, despite the insistence of the gift-giver. To improve upon these sparklers is quite simple. Take a sugar cube and place it in the bottom of the wine glass; dash it with aromatic bitters (Angostura, for instance), fill with cold “Champagne,” and garnish with a lemon peel.
Along with washing tin foil and collecting plastic jars, using the random bottles in the back of your fridge is perhaps the easiest way to save a buck. There will be some finagling as I can’t tell you how every wine tastes beforehand. Nor do I wish to taste all of your bad wine. Fortunately, with these recipes, neither do you.
