Rant: Want Ice With Your Wine?

I brought a couple bottles of wine to a pool party, including an inexpensive and delicious Portuguese white blend. I shared the wine with my friends who were intrigued to try it. As I sat at a patio table, sipping my own glass of wine, I suddenly cringed when I witnessed one of my friends carrying two glasses of my wine.

What made me cringe? He had ice cubes in both wine glasses. Ice cubes!

Initially, it seemed like such sacrilege and I teased my friend about the ice. In one respect, the ice was a mistake. My friend had brought his own wine, and it hadn't been chilled, so his wife asked him for ice in her glass. Even though my own wine had been chilled, my friend still added ice to the glass, following his wife's wish. If she had known the wine was already chilled, she probably wouldn't have asked for the ice.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have cringed at all. People are certainly entitled to drink their wine anyway they prefer and the wine was also inexpensive. And when I thought more about it, I realized that many of us also drink wine with ice, though we don't think about it very much. So, if many of us drink wine with ice, then we shouldn't be cringing when others also do so.

Ever drink a glass of Sangria with ice? Most people have and the base of Sangria is wine. I don't see anyone complaining that Sangria is a sacrilege of wine because of the ice. Tonight, I'll be at a restaurant serving a few different Sangrias for the summer, and I'll likely partake, basically enjoying wine on ice. And I won't think anything wrong about it. There are a number of cocktails, which contain ice, that also use wine as an ingredient. That is seen as creative not cringeworthy.


I still would cringe if someone added ice cubes to an expensive wine, even though they would be in their rights to add ice.