What to drink this summer
By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com
Summer provides another season, another reason for making some new sipping choices. It’s easy to fall back on drinking habits and not explore new drinks that might be right up your alley.
Emma Stetson thinks you should think about trying some new wines. She is the owner of Wine on Main in Concord and holds WSET (Wine Spirits Education Trust) Level Three certification in wine and spirits. A good place to start exploring, she said, is with rosés.
“For me,” she said, “the first thing that comes to mind for summer wines is rosé. It’s such a seasonal drink. It originated kind of in the Mediterranean, especially in France for the summers and people who are in their boats and who are looking for something with fresh acidity and very light and dry and clean and classic to enjoy even like with lunch or in the afternoon in those warm areas. It’s something very seasonal, so usually the freshest batch of rosé — which is 2024 now — you start seeing those come out around April and then they start disappearing again about September. They say it’s rosé season when the boats go in the water and when they come out of the water it ends.” (To clarify: “boats” in this case are yachts, not fishing boats.)
“Some people think that rosés are sweet,” Stetson said. ”That’s a misconception that people come to us with. I feel like white zinfandel gave rosé a bad rep because it’s a pink, sticky, sweet drink. But most rosés are dry and light and elegant, more along the lines of a white wine.”
Stetson also suggested that wine adventurers keep an open mind and think about wine cocktails.
“My husband and I traveled to Portugal last summer, and the best summer drink that we came home with is the Porto Tonic. You think of port being like a fortified, robust offering that you might enjoy like in front of the fire or something in the wintertime. But in warmer months, if you go to Portugal, everybody drinks the Porto Tonic. You start with lots of ice, tonic water, an orange slice, and then a kind of a port floater. They usually use white port, but you can use anything. We really like it with tawny port. It’s kind of like a spritz, if you will, kind of like a play on the gin and tonic or the Aperol spritz, but with port.”
Emma Stetson’s summer wine recommendations
“Mont Gravet Rosé is made just outside of Provence, France. It’s totally delicious, very light, very easy drinking and clean,” Stetson said.
“Artigiano Rosé is a rosé of Montepulciano from Italy — Montepulciano being the grape. That one’s fun. It’s still dry and relatively light in the glass, but just a little bit more flavorful. There’s like a little bit more strawberry and watermelon [flavors] for you to sink your teeth into. It’s just drinking phenomenally right now.” (750 ml, $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets)
“Any aromatic dry white wine is great,” Stetson said. “I love vinho verde in the summertime. That is a little bit lighter in alcohol too. It’s from a region in northern Portugal. Vinho verde is the grape that the wine is named after, but it’s become synonymous with a style of wine. What they do is they stop fermentation before all of the sugar has transformed into alcohol. They’re not extremely sweet, but there is a little bit of natural sugar left behind. They are just very appealing and easy drinking in the afternoons.” (Bicudo Vinho Verde, 750 ml, is $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.)
Emma Round owns Unwined Wine Bar in Milford. She’s also a fan of rosés in warm weather.
“As soon as I think about the summer,” Round said, “I think about ‘porch pounders.’ I think about rosés, I think easy-drinking, light, bright, breezy wines that we can enjoy with the amazing seafood we have here in New England. For me a ‘porch pounder’ is something that’s easy-drinking, with medium to high acidity, very smooth forward — something that is better drunk alone. You don’t need food for it. You don’t need it to be complex. You want it to be easy drinking.”
An additional advantage for that type of wine, Round said, is its affordability. “Something that we have to be very conscious of currently is economics,” she said. “We are in an economic downturn, so we want to drink affordably. We want to have the best-quality products for a lower price.”
Robert Waite, owner of Averill House Vineyard in Brookline, has an out-of-the-box summer wine suggestion: wine slushies, which he serves at his vineyard during the summer. Imagine a drink of ice granules and syrup from a convenience store, but made with good-quality wine.
“We make wine slushies with a red or a white wine every day,” Waite said. “And then the customer also has the ability to have the two blended and we call that a Zebra. So that’s always kind of fun and the flavors change from week to week, depending on which type of wine we’re using.” Averill House has been using South African wines in its white slushies recently. “They are really fun,” Waite said. “And then on the red side we have a couple that work really well. One of them is an aged blueberry wine that is aged with oak. We actually make it both ways, a sweet and a dry, but the dry is what we would use in the slushy. Because what happens is when you get the ice, any sweetness that’s in the wine itself is enhanced by the ice.”
The wine slushies go extremely well with food, Waite said, but obviously not anything that takes itself too seriously. “We usually have a couple of different things to serve with them,” he said, “”but one of the fun things that we offer is a tasting board that is wine chips. They’re actually potato chips that are created specifically to enhance the flavors of wine. That’s kind of fun because you’ve got a sweet component inside the wine and then you’ve got a seasoned and salty combination with the chips.”
Krista Fisher’s summer cocktail recommendations
You’ve got company, but it’s been raining all week: “If you’re staying inside, pop a bottle of prosecco. People love that,” Fisher said. “The sound of the pop of a cork is an instant party. Whether it’s raining out or not, it’s going to put people in that mood. A great cocktail to add to that to is a French 75. That’s my go-to for a cocktail. Bubbly, lemony, a little bit of gin. You could jazz it up any way you want.”
It’s been hot and dry and you’ve been gardening: “You want something like a John Daly, like what they drink on a golf course. It has fresh iced tea, fresh lemonade, vodka and fresh mint. It’s light, and when the glass sweats, it makes you thirsty,” Fisher said.
The kids have been driving you crazy all day and they’re finally out of your hair for an hour or so: “For this, you’d better make it bold and quick, right? So a nice whiskey sour. This is a good way to use brown liquors or bourbons in a more spring or summer way. Again, fresh lemon juice, a little bit of simple [syrup], and a cherry on top.”
Wine is clearly delicious and a solid summer drinking option, but when you picture sitting on a porch on a summer evening, it’s probably beer that comes to mind. Is there a difference between summer beers and ones you might drink when it’s cold outside?
Brian Link and Camaron Carter have put a lot of thought into that.
Link and Carter are the owners of the Sunstone Brewing Co. in Londonderry and, like many microbrewers, they brew different types of beer depending on the season. This summer they’ve been thinking a lot about pineapples.
“It’s one of those things where pineapples are great this time of year,” Link said. “They are super refreshing. We kind of always make a small batch of something to test it out.” One of these test batches was called Pineapple Express, which sold out almost immediately. “It flew,” Link said. “It only lasted for about a weekend.”
Traditionally, Link said, summer beers tend to be lighter — lighter in color, lighter in flavor, and lower in alcohol. At the moment, he said, Sunstone is looking at brewing something called a Saison beer. “It’s kind of light,” he said, “with an alcohol level of about five percent. It will have some fresh ginger, lavender and coriander in it. It’s going to be a nice, light, refreshing summer beer. Another thing we’re thinking of doing is a hefeweizen [a German-style beer made mostly with wheat instead of barley], which is a nice light beer. It’s got a lot of flavor, it’ll have a lot of citrus to it, it’ll be very bright and easy to drink.”
Carter said summer is a good time for brewers and beer drinkers to explore fruit beers.
“Our next sour is going to be mai tai-inspired,” he said. “Again, there’s a little bit of pineapple, but you’ve got some cherry in there too. It’s still very light and refreshing. I think our next limited release is going to be blueberry and açaí berry, with pomegranate. We’ll have a lot of small-batch and larger-batch blueberry mix-ups going through the season. Whether it’ll be a golden ale or a hefeweizen, it’ll be a good mix.”
Brian Dobson is the owner of Bert’s Beer & Wine in Manchester. He agrees that during the summer customers look for lighter beers. “I find that typically they want a lower ABV [alcohol by volume], crisper, and easy to drink,” he said. “So a non-light beer would be like a double dry hopped IPA, right, where it’s very thick in the body, and if you drink two of them really fast you’re going to feel very full. Whereas if you drink a wheat beer you can have a couple of those and you’re going to be fine. Typically when someone comes to me and they’re like, ‘I want something light and easy for hot weather’ or ‘I want [something to drink while] I sit on the patio’, that’s what they’re looking for.”
Krista Fisher is the manager and bar manager at Local Street Eats in Nashua. She designs a slate of summer cocktails based on ingredients that are especially good and available.
“I always usually say we live in such a great area,” Fisher said. “In New Hampshire, just having all the seasons means we have all different things available to us season to season. There are a couple of staple drinks that stay on the menu year-round,” Fisher said, “but usually we try to change up just about everything the same way the kitchen would. So I think our menu has about 12 or 13 drinks on it, and I’ll probably change at least nine of them. As we go into the summer, this is the menu we’ve most been looking forward to. The fact that we can pick our own strawberries, blueberries, flowers, everything like that, right in our neighborhood really inspires the drink menu pretty hard. Fresh is always the way to go.”
Brian Dobson’s New Hampshire summer beer recommendations
White Mountain White Ale by Concord Craft Brewing: “It’s light and easy to drink. It’s got a good orange flavor, and a little coriander,” Dobson said. $3.80 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.
“I always recommend Schilling’s beers. They’re out of Littleton, New Hampshire. They do a lot of old-world style, Pilsners and lagers, either German or Czech style,” he said. “They have dark lagers, which are roasty and malty, but still light on the tongue and crisp and refreshing. They’re fantastic.” Schilling Especial Mexican-Style Lager is $4.10 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.
“Woodstock [The Woodstock Inn Brewery] does a Lemon Blueberry Pale Ale, which is very blueberry-y and very lemony.” $3.20 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.
“The Sea Dog Blue Paw is kind of a classic that you can have year round; it’s light and easy to drink.” $19.95 for a 12-pack of 12-ounce cans at Bert’s.
Fisher, too, sees summer as a time for lighter drinks.
“I try to always lighten up bourbons and stuff like that,” she said, “to make them all-season. But when you think of summer, you definitely think of gins and tequilas. I mean, margaritas are the drink of the summer, right? But also lower-ABV stuff because it’s hotter out and people are maybe outside a little bit more. So that’s where spritzes will always be popular, something with a lower level of alcohol, maybe like an aperitif. So, something like prosecco that has bubbles, that you can drink by the pool but then not feel like, ‘Oh man, I can’t do anything for the rest of the day.’”
Marissa Chick, the bar manager at The Birch on Elm in Manchester, considers a classic daiquiri one of the quintessential cocktails of summer — not, she hastened to add, the frozen blender drinks that call themselves daiquiris.
“A daiquiri is pretty simple and a classic,” she said. “The only ingredients that need to be in there for it to be a daiquiri are lime, sugar and rum. Rum and summer go together like hand in hand. It’s just nice and refreshing, at least if you’re doing it the original way. So it’s supposed to be fairly tart, not too sweet, but pretty dry as well. So like a dry, tart drink.”
“When I started bartending,” Chick said, “I learned the Hemingway daiquiri first; it was Hemingway’s drink of choice — super tart and way less sweet. Iit was white rum, lime, grapefruit and maraschino liqueur. It had double the amount of rum as usual.”
One of the reasons Chick likes daiquiris so much, she said, is their adaptability. She recently won a “Daq-Off” daiquiri-making competition with a bright pink Bubble Gum Daiquiri. “I had tried to make a bubble gum drink work for a while,” she said, “I tried out a couple different variations … Once I heard about the Daq-Off happening, I thought, well, that’s a fun drink and I feel like something sweet obviously goes in the daiquiri very well. So I researched bubble gum a little bit to see what kind of flavorings go into it naturally, like cherry, pineapple, lime and mint. I used natural pineapple juice, natural cranberry juice, cherry juice, and made everything separate. I used a dark rum and [the finished drink] was a nice bright pink color. I used a charred pineapple with some pineapple fronds as garnish. So it was very summery and fun.”
Emma Round’s summer wine recommendations
“I have an incredible rosé on my list right now called Prisma from Chile,” Round said. “It’s a rosé, it is a pinot noir base. It’s very fruity. We all think of red pinot noir, but this is a rosé pinot noir. It is very bold, but it’s very easy-drinking and it’s really nice by itself. I could happily drink a bottle of it by myself.” (750 ml, $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets)
To drink at a clam bake: “With clams and lobsters I want something with a little backbone but I also want some minerality to it. So my first reach would probably be a vinho verde or an alborinho,” Round said. According to winefolly.com, this is another Portuguese wine from the coastal area of the Iberian Peninsula, popular for its rich stone fruit flavors, a hint of salinity, and its zippy acidity. An example: Nortico Alvarinho, 750 ml, $18.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.
To drink at a backyard barbecue with burgers and hot dogs: “So, with burgers and dogs, if you want to go red. I would probably pick up a pinotage from South Africa,” Round said. “In South Africa they do things called braais. A braai is their version of grilling, barbecuing. Pinotages are a good match for them. They have a richness, a meatiness to them. And they give off notes of berries, almost like a tea flavor with some orange peel in there.” Consider Longridge Pinotage, 750 ml, $26.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.
To drink on a picnic: “I would love for someone on a picnic to pull out a crémant — a crémant de Loire, a crémant de Bourgogne, a crémant of some sort,” Round said. “It’s a sparkling wine. Usually they’re from different areas of France. They are made in the same style as Champagne, but they’re more affordable. They use different [grape] varietals. A creme de Loire usually contains like a chenin blanc, which gives it some more floral notes, and they’re just beautiful, well-made sparkling wines at a much lower price point than a Champagne, but similar quality. For me, they go beautifully with crackers and a charcuterie board. You can get a good crémant for 20 bucks.” An example: Maurice Bonnamy Cremant De Loire Brut, $18.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.
Featured photo: Blueberry Daiquiri by Marissa Chick. Courtesy photo.
