Chill Out: How Wyandotte Winery’s fresh and fruity wine slushies are keeping wine cool, for everyone
There’s a time and place for your Merlots, your Cabernets, and your Malbecs, but when summer weather hits, you’d best be sipping on a simple yet satisfying wine slushie.
One Columbus-area spot that has a handle on the adult answer to the push pop is Wyandotte Winery, a nearly half-century-old fixture just outside the outerbelt near Blendon Woods Metro Park.
“You know, they aren’t particularly complex, they’re just not, but that’s kind of the point,” said Wyandotte owner Robin Coolidge, who took over the winery in 2006. “On a hot summer day they’re just so refreshing and cool, and they really do taste great. If you’re not drinking something you like, that’s the only way to drink wrong.”
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For a base, Wyandotte uses a lighter wine, such as a white or a variety of fruit wines like apple, cranberry, and raspberry. The winery then punches it up with additional fruit flavors.
The slushies are finished inside Wyandotte’s on-site slushie machine (which is actually no different from the ones you might see at your corner bodega). Coolidge and company are able to offer only two flavors at a time due to the capacity of the machine, but they make sure to constantly rotate between a bevy of proven favorites and fun new creations.
Right now at Wyandotte, they’re serving up lemon-apple and watermelon-raspberry slushies.
“This watermelon raspberry, people are loving it,” Coolidge said. “And most flavors with raspberry are a hit as well, so we’ve done raspberry lemonade, straight raspberry, you name it.”
In fact, the slushies (which he started selling in 2016) have become so popular that Coolidge now offers them year-round, even though the frozen treats started as a summer seasonal offering.
“We used to take them off the menu in the winter, and the first thing that happened is customers would come up to us asking what happened to them,” Coolidge said with a laugh. “So now we keep them on all year long.”
If all this talk of straightforward flavors seems a little too simple for the oftentimes ultra-serious world of wine, that’s sort of the point.
“Our slushies aren’t the most sophisticated thing; they’re just a lot of fun, and people enjoy drinking them.” Coolidge said. “Because really, more than anything, that’s what we’re trying to do. We want to demystify wine for people, because they’ll enjoy it more. And that’s what this is all about, right?”
To learn more, visit wyandottewinery.com
If you like this, read: Road trip! Central Ohio wineries to launch new wine trail
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