San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Summer’s new spritzers
Wine’s answer to White Claw — here are the best to try
Mixing wine with soda water — and maybe you throw in a piece of fruit — is not a newfangled idea. You may know this recipe as the wine cooler, made famous in the 1980s by brands like California Cooler and Bartles & Jaymes. Their sweet, fizzy, fruity bottles became a nationwide sensation, and, later, a punch line, as “wine cooler” came to be seen as synonymous with lowbrow, saccharine swill.
Well, everything old is new again, especially in the sphere of massmarket alcohol. This time, the industry is calling the wineandsoda water combo a wine spritzer and putting the drinks in sleek aluminum cans. In many cases, they’re slashing the sugar content and seriously upping the quality of the base wine. Canned wine spritzers are the wine industry’s answer to the hard seltzer craze — and at least a few of them taste very, very good, combining the bubbliness and fruitjuice flavors of a Spindrift with the bitter bite of an Aperol spritz.
Though this new wave of canned wine spritzers has been slowly gaining momentum for a few years, it’s suddenly taking off in a whole new way. These products are part of a larger category that industry analysts refer to as RTD, or ready to drink: prepackaged beverages that have already been mixed for you. Lately, it feels as if I hear of a new RTD release every day, whether it’s Nomadica’s piquette or Ghia’s nonalcoholic spritz or Luxardo’s canned aperitivo cocktails. In the first five months of this year, the RTD wine category grew by 18.4% in value, according to Nielsen, while total wine sales actually decreased by 1.5%.
Looking back, the rise of canned wine spritzers seems preordained. These drinks sit at the intersection of two products that have been trending for years now: canned wine and canned, flavored sparkling water, like La Croix. In fact, Josh Phelps, a Napa winemaker who makes the Space Age Rosé Spritzer, came up with the idea for his Meyer lemon and strawberryflavored spritzer a few years ago when he found himself on a boat on Lake Tahoe, mixing rosé with La Croix. (By the time he got the product to market, 2½ years later, he says, he realized he hadn’t been the only one with that idea.)
The RTD category’s hottest product right now is hard seltzer. But to some people, like Phelps (and me), hard seltzer tastes gross, like artificial chemicals. “For people who like good wine, what’s the alternative to White Claw?” Phelps asks.
Canned wine spritzers tend to check the same boxes that people look for in hard seltzer, like low alcohol content (most of what I tasted was between 5% and 8% ABV) and light calorie counts (mostly 70120 calories per 250ml can). “I should probably thank White Claw,” says Josh Rosenstein, who says he’s seen demand for his 6yearold Hoxie Spritzer brand grow as hard seltzer has boomed.
And like hard seltzers, this new crew of canned spritzers has managed to be genderneutral. Just as the highly feminized hardseltzer prototype Zima yielded to the brofriendly White Claw, the negative feminine stereotype of wine coolers in the 1980s is now virtually nonexistent. San Francisco’s Usual Wines, which just launched its second canned wine spritzer flavor, has noticed this firsthand. “Our core audience for Usual is predominantly female,” says CEO Matt Dukes, referring to Usual’s main line of nonspritzer wines. “But with the spritz, it’s actually been predominantly male.”
What a product like Hoxie can offer that White Claw can’t, however, is ingredient transparency. While White Claw is derived from industrial malt liquor, Hoxie is made from California Chardonnay. (Its flavor sourcing is bona fide, too, going through Mandy Aftel, the Berkeley perfume maker known for her natural ingredients, for most of its spritzer flavorings.) Rosenstein has even poured his spritzers, which come in flavors like watermelonhatch chile and grapefruitelderflower, at natural wine festivals like Brumaire in Oakland.
Now, Rosenstein says, he’ll get calls from restaurants or bars — the sorts of places with high standards for the ingredients they use — that feel they have to stock something that’s hard seltzeradjacent to please the masses, but want something that’s a little better quality. Hoxie’s spritzers fit the bill. And while there are plenty of bigger companies getting into the canned spritzer game, some of the most notable players are independent, like Space Age, Hoxie and Ramona, which is owned by New York sommelier Jordan Salcito.
There are many reasons to love the current cast of canned wine spritzers. They’re portable. Aluminum is more recyclable than glass. They’re sessionable, meaning you can drink a few of them and you won’t feel the effects that you would from an equivalent volume of wine.
What I also appreciate is that they give us permission to have some fun with wine. Yes, it’s OK to mix wine with soda water. To add flavorings. To drink something not because you care what vineyard it came from or what vintage it is — but just because it’s fruity and fizzy and cold.
Here are some of the best canned wine spritzers I’ve tasted.
Hoxie Spritzer Lemon Ginger Rosé (5%, $28 for eight 250-ml cans): I’ve loved all of the spritzers I’ve tasted from Hoxie, a Los Angeles company founded in 2015, and the lemon ginger rosé (an update on one of its original flavors, lemon ginger) is among my favorites. The profile is strongly ginger-forward, almost austere in its dry spiciness, with bracing, refreshing bubbles and just a hint of juicy fruitiness from the additions of lemon and lime.
Space Age Rosé Spritz (5.5%, $15 for four 250ml cans): Napa winemaker Josh Phelps, owner of Grounded Wine Co., was already making a rosé called Space Age, made from California Grenache, when he decided to turn that same base wine into a canned spritzer, adding Meyer lemon and strawberry flavors. The strawberry note dominates here — it kind of tastes like a melted strawberry Popsicle, with a very light sweetness that rounds out the drink’s citrusy zing.
Usual Yuzu Spritz (7.25%, $48 for eight 250-ml cans): San Francisco’s Usual Wines, whose main product is wine in a single-serving bottle, launched a guava-flavored canned spritz last year as an experiment. It proved so popular that they did a second run, this time using yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that tastes a little bit like a mandarin crossed with a grapefruit. The spritzer is delightfully tart — if you like the taste of yuzu, you will love this — yet also tastes recognizably like wine. A spritzer for the Prosecco crowd.
Bubble Butt Rosé Seltzer (8.4%, $29.99 for eight 250-ml cans): The name is, well, cheeky, but this combination of soda water and California rosé wine is balanced and crisp. Due to the fact that it doesn’t have any flavorings, Bubble Butt is probably the most wine-like product on this list, delivering a profile that’s in line with a dry, sub-$20 rosé: grapefruit, red berries, melon. It’s made from French Colombard and Burger — two workhorse grapes largely grown in the Central Valley — by War Room Cellars, the fastgrowing company best known for acquiring Bonny Doon Vineyard.
Ramona Blood Orange Wine Spritz (7%, $20 for four 250-ml cans): Like Hoxie, Ramona — whose founder, Jordan Salcito, was the longtime beverage director at Momofuku in New York — has been in the canned spritzer game for a few years already. (I like the fact that its labels look like the “Rushmore” movie poster.) Made from Sicilian wine grapes, Ramona’s blood orange flavor tastes much more like an Italian spritz cocktail, or possibly like a mimosa made with blood orange juice, than like a glass of wine. It’s got a bitter, pithy bite and a bright blaze of acidity rounding out its generous fruitiness.
Chandon Garden Spritz (11%, $30 for a 750-ml bottle): Bay Area drinkers may know Chandon from its tasting room in Yountville, but the winery has locations in several different countries, and this spritzer — released in a traditional sparkling wine bottle, not a can — comes from Ana Paula Bartolucci, the winemaker at Chandon’s winery in Argentina. The base wine is Chardonnay, Semillon and Pinot Noir, made in the Charmat method (similar to Prosecco), then blended with a liqueur made from Valencia oranges, cardamom, black pepper, chamomile and other additions. It’s moderately sweet (11 grams of sugar per serving), delightfully bitter and would more than satisfy an Aperol spritz craving. Plus, there’s just something fun about popping open a sparkling-wine bottle that a can can’t approximate.
Decoy Premium Seltzer Chardonnay with Lemon Ginger (5.5%, $15 for four 250-ml cans): Decoy is the value-price brand owned by Duckhorn, which recently became one of the first wine companies to go public in quite some time. Its Chardonnay-lemonginger flavor is subtle, with much less of an assertive punch than some of the others on this list and soft bubbles emphasizing the citrus flavor. The “seltzer” name is apt: This passes much more convincingly for a hard seltzer (or a lemon La Croix) than a wine cocktail.