Modern traditions for watered wine?

December 17, 2022 4:03 PM

Characters in fiction drinking watered wine is a common trope. Are there modern cultural traditions of this, or is it relegated to anachronism/fantasy?

Years ago I decided to try this, specifically 1:1 or 2:1 hot water to red wine, and it's WONDERFUL, but I'm curious if there are any modern traditions of this. All I can find are poorly-sourced references to Greek and Roman traditions about water purity. Are there any countries/cultures where this kind of water/wine mixing is pretty common? Let's say that "wine" can be broadly interpreted to fermented sweet-ish alcohol (to include plums, honey/mead, etc) for the purposes of the questions.

posted by curious nu to Food & Drink (23 answers total)

This was common practice in Ancient Greece and Rome, so it’s not just a fantasy thing. The one modern example I can think of is a white wine spritzer (wine mixed with sparkling water) like my mom drinks in the summer. Hot water and red wine sounds unusual to me, but perhaps closer to the tradition of mulled wine in winter.
posted by vanitas at 4:20 PM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Watered down wine has traditionally been given to children in France. When I was a kid (this was around 1973-1975) the south of France was our yearly holiday destination; as we travelled there by car, we stopped for meals in roadside restaurants and I distinctly remember that I thought I picked a cup of fruit juice to drink with my meal. It turned out to be a weak wine, meant for children. It was a disappointment as I was expecting something sweeter, and did not like it!

Weissweinschorle and Rotweinschorle (white / red wine watered down with sparkling water) are commonly served in Germany as a summery drink.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:25 PM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Why watering down wine was once the height of sophistication
posted by blob at 4:25 PM on December 17, 2022

Spritzer.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:27 PM on December 17, 2022

Response by poster: Want to emphasize the post title, which is looking for modern traditions of this, and not something in the past.
posted by curious nu at 4:36 PM on December 17, 2022

Sangria could be considered a modern version of this, depending on how much liquor you add. I’ve had some nice ones that just have a dash of liquor for aroma and are otherwise wine plus fruit juice and sparkling water. Very drinkable on a hot day. Apparently warm winter sangria is a thing? But I’ve only seen recipes for that in like, homemaker focused magazines, so who knows if it’s real.
posted by Mizu at 5:00 PM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

My stepmom is from the former Yugoslavia and her parents drink white wine mixed with sparkling water. My understanding is that it's an Eastern European thing.

I'm actually drinking a Sauvignon Blanc mixed with mango sparkling water right now and it's delicious.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 5:11 PM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Is this possibly related to the "session" or "sesionable" beers? Link
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:20 PM on December 17, 2022

Shandy is definitely an extant cousin of this
posted by lalochezia at 5:39 PM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mixing red wine and coke is a thing, too. (Link is to a wikipedia page about calimocho, using the term from Spain, but as it says more widespread than that: "It is also known as katemba in South Africa, cátembe in Mozambique, bambus in Croatia, jote in Chile, and jesus juice in Argentina.")
posted by Dip Flash at 6:02 PM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had friends in high school whose parents watered down wine for them when they were kids. (By the time we discussed it as teenagers, they were drinking it full strength.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:55 PM on December 17, 2022

Best answer: When I visited Italy many, many years ago with a friend who had been living there for a year and spoke Italian, we went to a workman's lunch place and he said, and we saw, that people typically drank their wine with water. The idea is that it is a quick lunch and you want to drink wine, and want to drink a full glass, but don't want to drink a full glass of wine for your quick lunch. So you water it down.

I just now tried searching for this on the web and boy oh boy is this idea heavily buried beneath millions of results of all the wonderful Italian wines and wine regions, wine restaurants, wine vacations. If you try to force 'wine with water' you'll get the ancient Greece articles. Any other mention of wine with water is a result of someone telling you what a bad idea this is.

I did manage to find one Quora result of this Italian guy who said that yes, the typical working guy will add water to his wine for a work day lunch.

So you decide. Is this one of those truths that the Internet refuses to acknowledge or even recognize, or is my (and this one Italian guy's) memory fooling me?
posted by eye of newt at 9:38 PM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

In Spain it's very common to mix (bad) red wine with Gaseosa, which is a slightly sweet sparkling water, to make Tinto de Verano.
posted by gregjones at 12:39 AM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Happens every day in Catholic churches during Eucharist: In preparing the sacrament, the priest blesses the water to represent the grace of God bestowed during baptism with water. The holy water is then mixed with red wine, which symbolises the blood of Christ . . .
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:46 AM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was raised Eastern Orthodox Christian (Greek/Russian/Romanian/Ethiopian/Coptic/whatever: the difference is just the language the services are in, and some of the ceremonial details. It's all the same religion, same way Irish and Mexican Catholics are both the same religion), and we also mixed boiled water with the wine during the eucharist. We worked out when to turn the kettle on in the back based on what point in the Divine Liturgy we had reached.

But this is a little spoonful of port-and-water-soaked bread ingested for religious reasons, rather than a drink that is sipped and enjoyed for relaxation.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:42 AM on December 18, 2022

On the subject of watering alcohol, however, it's generally accepted that a spoonful of water will "open up" the bouquet of distilled spirits. This is one reason that "whisky stones" are frowned on by aficionados: they chill a drink that's best enjoyed at room temperature, and don't even melt in any water to open it up.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:46 AM on December 18, 2022

Best answer: countries/cultures where this kind of water/wine mixing is pretty common

As mentioned above, weisser Spritzer, which is wine and sparkling water one part each is and has been a very popular drink in Central Europe.
Here in Vienna, it is usually Grüner Veltliner and Soda Wasser in equal parts. In summer many prefer a Sommerspritzer, which is 1 part wine to 2 parts Soda Wasser.
(Soda Wasser is plain water carbonated, no additives)
I know a few people who drink Roter Spritzer but unless you specify a Spritzer here in Vienna is white.
There are many variations: for example a Hugo, which is weisser Spritzer with elderflower sirup and lemon.

Off topic: in Vienna, Red wine with Cola is called a Rüscherl (bit of lace) indicating it is a ladies drink, and considered a relic of the 1970s.
posted by 15L06 at 11:00 AM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Hot port is very common in winter in pubs in Ireland, especially during this recent cold snap. It's 50/50 port and boiling water, with a slice of lemon with a few cloves pressed in. It might be popular elsewhere too but I'm only familiar with it in Ireland.
posted by CheeseLouise at 2:22 PM on December 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: White port with tonic water is a Portuguese apéritif.
posted by Jabberwocky at 3:06 AM on December 19, 2022

I grew up (in the seventies) with watered down wine for dinner on weekends. My brother and I had special little metal cups that would be put on the table to signify it was a wine-drinking day. Much later, my grandmother explained that the reason there were metal cups for children, and sometimes also ladies, was that then it wasn't noticed if one didn't drink up. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere so it might have been a very local tradition.
If the adults were drinking a fine wine, we'd have a sip of wine instead, so we could learn what good wine was. I have not served my children wine, watered down or pure, and my brother hasn't either, so the tradition has died out in our family. We only has sweet drinks very rarely, maybe two or three times a year. I have held on to that part of the tradition, but my kids had tap water.
When I lived in Rome for a while during the eighties, people in cheap lunch bars would mix the bad wine with Coca Cola, which was a good idea, because the wine was terrible and acidic, and the coke was too sweet to go with food.
And yes, Spritzers are still a very widespread thing, in all of the German speaking areas, in large parts of Eastern Europe and in Northern Italy. Aperol Spritz has become very popular all over the world in the last decade, but it is just one variation out of many.
posted by mumimor at 7:25 AM on December 19, 2022

Best answer: Wine with seltzer is absolutely still a thing in Argentina. Generally it's cheap red wine, and the old-school way to do it is to order a pitcher (a generation ago, this would have been a "penguin" -- a 1-litre ceramic jug ) of the house red and a siphon bottle of soda (seltzer) and mix your own at the table.

Two examples of how normalized this is from popular culture:
1) An old dad joke when you want someone to shut up: "Hey, what did the soda say to the wine? SHHHH!"

2) This song about a Lady and the Tramp-style love story between a bottle of wine and a soda siphon bottle, who belong together however much the snobs might not approve.
posted by dr. boludo at 9:00 AM on December 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: When I lived with a family in Italy in 1992, they regularly drank wine watered down with sparkling water. They also gave their 13 year old water with just a splash of wine. It was a very casual, at home practice.
posted by tangosnail at 9:49 AM on December 19, 2022

Best answer: A standard Hungarian summer drink is fröccs, a mix of wine (usually dry young white, rarely rosé) and soda water. Most variants of the fröccs range from a 2:1 to a 1:2 dilution (with equal parts water and wine as the baseline standard), although there are well-known recipes as strong as 4:1 and as weak as 1:4 — a "nágy házmester" ("overjanitor") is pretty universally recognized as the name for four parts wine to one part water, but it's not nearly as popular as a weaker spritzer.
posted by jackbishop at 10:21 AM on December 19, 2022 [1 favorite]