Frosé, Three Ways

From Willa Jean's minimalist approach to Extra Fancy's Campari-topped Frozémonade, here are three ways to frosé today.

Frose

What do you get when you cross rosé, summer’s most inescapable beverage, with that bastion of summer refreshers, the slushie? Frozen rosé—or frosé. This opportunistic invention was, of course, inevitable. The question is, What took so long? 

Frosé finds its spiritual home in New Orleans, a place where you’re never more than a few blocks from a frozen Daiquiri. It’s there that, to the veritable bounty of frozen drinks, Kelly Fields of Willa Jean has added her Frosé Y’all. The most simplistic of the frosé recipes we’ve found to date, Fields’ recipe consists of nothing more than rosé (Mas de Daumas Gassac, no less), ice and simple syrup, blended until smooth. “It got way too hot too quickly in New Orleans,” explains Fields. “We knew we needed something summery and delicious right away.”

Down in Atlanta, The Luminary takes a slightly more baroque approach. Foregoing the blender, the restaurant starts with a Aperol-based mix that is frozen ahead to make a granita, which is then piled into a coupe and topped with a floater of pink wine. “We wanted something a little more visually striking,” says owner Jeremy Iles of the Meghan Royale, which is named for one of the restaurant’s close friends named, yes, Meghan.

Up north at Brooklyn’s Extra Fancy, the bar’s Frozémonade began as rosé sour. When the drink simply tasted like a mix of rosé and lemonade, Krueger decided to “take frozen rosé lemonade and smush it all together,” he says. “We were just goofing around with it and were like ‘What about frosémonade?'” (They eventually changed the “s” to a “z” because “it’s much funnier if you spell it with a ‘z’,” he says.) The bar offers it topped with Campari, Pisco, mezcal—or any spirit your heart desires, really.

“People, once they [personalize] it, they want their friends to try it and they’re like, ‘Gotta do it that way’,” says Kreuger. “And they’re always back for another round.”