Not to be confused with Winos On Ice, where Robert Parker and Karen MacNeil dance on skates to "Wind Beneath My Wings."  No, what I’m talking about is wines on ice–which is exactly how I plan on drinking them this spring.

Before you call my boss to have me fired, hear out these caveats: I will not be drinking all of my wine on ice. Just some of it. I mean, I’m not such a complete heathen that I’ll be putting ice cubes in my Zins.

But some of my whites and rosés? Hell to the yes.

This delicious discovery came to me in a state of hungry delirium. It was 11:30 at night and the dinner I was cooking still wasn’t ready (blame my lack of foresight and a stupid insistence on making pizza dough). I was by myself and only wanted a glass or two, so I didn’t want to open a bottle of any kind of worth. And after looking through my stash, the most worthless bottle I could find was a 2006 rosé.

Technically, rosés aren’t really supposed to hold up much past their release date. So maybe I thought that I was screwed with this wine anyway, and that’s why I poured it into a tumbler instead of a wine glass. And maybe because it was in a tumbler I thought I’d throw some ice in, just for aesthetic reasons. Whatever my reasons, I was soon drinking an old rosé in a tumbler with ice on a snowy night in March—sacrilegious in almost every way.

But you know who makes up all those rules about wine? Snobs. And I don’t know what the snobs were drinking that night, but I was drinking something seriously delicious—crisp and refreshing, with brilliant flavors, kind of like savory cherry juice. And you know what? It looked fabulous, too.  I’m sure that if I had left the wine in the glass for a while the ice would have melted and diluted the whole thing, making for something that tasted more like wine-flavored water than anything else. But two glasses later the ice was pretty much intact—the wine was so delicious, and I had consumed it so quickly, that it hadn’t had any time to melt.

Photo: David Tamarkin