Last week I traveled to Tuscany, the birthplace of the Renaissance, the home of Chianti, land of cobblestones and no air conditioning and extremely rare T-bone steaks. What better place to expand your palate and acquaint yourself with new ways of tasting, living, being? What better place to mix one of the most cursed beverages known to mankind: Gatorwine?
I met up with my best friend and some of her friends, who have a tradition of trying horrifying drink combinations; some of their greatest hits include BORG night and Flamin' Hot Mountain Dew night. When we met, they were reviewing the Monster Energy gelato they had just tried (disgusting, allegedly). So it was a natural segue to talk about their next culinary conquest for the trip.
Gatorwine is, uh, exactly what it sounds like: Gatorade and wine. (This has apparently been going around on TikTok, and the food creator Babish has posted a video of him trying it.) Crucially, the Gatorade must be light blue, and the wine must be red, and ideally cheap and shitty. It doesn't much matter what kind of red wine it is, because we aren't doing this to appreciate wine. After a few days in Florence, we decamped to an extremely fancy villa about an hour outside the city for a wedding. I had the privilege of being a plus-one who didn’t know anybody at the event, so I was free to enjoy the scenery, which included an infinity pool and acres of vineyards. I saw grapes on a vine for the first time in my life, and even snuck one to see if wine grapes tasted different from the cotton candy grapes back home (they did!). I drank the wines made from those grapes, which were wonderful. But as I drowsed by the pool to piano covers of “Halo” and "Get Lucky," my mind kept returning to the one as-yet-untasted delicacy.
After a few hours in the sun, our compatriots nodded to us and whispered, “It’s time.” We quietly toweled off and met in the “Honesty Bar,” a small room hidden behind a painting off the foyer of the villa. They weren’t able to find Gatorade, so we used blue Powerade instead. Veering from the formula felt somewhat sacrilegious yet also in keeping with the depravity of Gatorwine; as a University of Georgia grad, I was pleased. They brewed the concoction in a 1:1 ratio, and poured a bit into glasses arranged on the sideboard. A portrait of a long-dead aristocrat watched as our mixologist bestowed each of us with a glass of Gatorwine, offering it to us as “the blood of Christ,” to which we replied “amen” and crossed ourselves. We cheersed and drank our fey nectar, never to be the same again.
It was delicious. It tasted like red wine on the front, with just a hint of sweet on the back, with notes of "blue." Truly a delight. After our clandestine communion, we mixed the rest into a Powerade bottle and squirted it into fellow guests’ mouths in the pool.
I could make the case that Gatorwine is a brilliant way to rehydrate while drinking alcohol on a hot summer day, but I would be selling short its merits. Gatorwine is a drink for the brave and the bold, for those who aren’t too good to use color as a flavor profile, for those who remember who they truly are, no matter how fancy their surroundings.
