Frosé: How to Make Frozen Rosé at Home

Frosé is rosé wine frozen to a slush, usually with strawberries, sugar and lemon juice. You don’t need a slushie machine: freeze the wine, then blend or scrape it, and you have a pink, icy drink for a hot afternoon. It needs at least a few hours in the freezer, so start in the morning. Below are two methods from the sources we used, which rosé to buy and how the drink started.

Two ways to make frosé

There are two common approaches, and both come from people who make it for a living:

	Food & Wine (freeze the whole mix)	Bar Primi (freeze the wine, then blend)
Rosé	One 750 ml bottle	One bottle
Fruit	Strawberry simple syrup	Strawberry purée
Extra flavor	Lemon juice, plus tequila, vodka or gin	A little vermouth
Freezing time	At least 6 hours, up to 10	A few hours or overnight
Equipment	Blender for the syrup, freezer container	Freezer container, blender
Serves	6	Not stated

Method 1: Food & Wine’s freezer frosé

Food & Wine’s recipe, by Josh Phelps, builds the fruit into a strawberry syrup so the slush stays smooth rather than icy. Its ingredients:

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
• 5 large fresh strawberries (about 7½ ounces), hulled
• 1 bottle (750 ml) rosé
• ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 2 lemons)
• ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (3 ounces) tequila, vodka or gin
• Aperol, optional

The steps, as Food & Wine gives them:

1. Make a simple syrup. Bring the sugar and water to a boil and simmer until the sugar dissolves, about 3 minutes. Let it cool completely.
2. Make the strawberry syrup. Blend the strawberries with 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of the syrup until smooth, about a minute, then strain out the solids.
3. Mix. In a large freezer-safe container, stir together the rosé, lemon juice, spirit and 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of the strawberry syrup.
4. Freeze and stir. Cover and freeze for at least 6 hours and up to 10, stirring once every hour. Food & Wine notes that the mix won’t freeze completely because of the alcohol.
5. Serve. Divide among 6 chilled glasses and, if you like, top each with a splash of Aperol.

Food & Wine says the finished frosé keeps in an airtight container in the freezer for up to a month, and the strawberry syrup can be made up to 3 days ahead and kept in the fridge. Food & Wine suggests using leftover syrup in other cocktails and mocktails.

The spirit makes this version stronger than wine alone. In our view, you can leave it out for a lighter drink; expect a firmer freeze if you do, since alcohol is what keeps the mix soft.

Method 2: the Bar Primi way at home

Justin Sievers, then general manager of Bar Primi in New York, explained his home method to WTOP News in 2016:

1. Freeze the rosé. Pour a bottle into a plastic container, ideally with a lid, and freeze it for a few hours or overnight.
2. Check the texture. Take it out when it looks like a slushie, and scoop it out like a sorbet or granita.
3. Blend. Add a little vermouth for flavor and strawberry purée for color and texture. Sievers said the vermouth helps because freezing tends to dull the wine’s flavors.

His main warning: don’t just blend chilled rosé with ice. He told WTOP it waters the drink down and gives it a less pleasant consistency. (Bon Appétit’s recipe does blend the frozen rosé with some crushed ice, so the sources differ on this point.)

Tip: Pour the rosé into a wide, shallow container rather than a deep one. In our view, a thinner layer freezes faster and is easier to scrape.

Which rosé to use

Bon Appétit’s frosé recipe, by Rick Martinez, gives the most useful advice: choose a full-flavored, full-bodied, dark-colored rosé, because it will lose some color and be a bit diluted after freezing and blending, so you want a wine that can hold its own.

In our view, that points away from the palest, most delicate bottles and toward deeper pinks. Good choices:

• Deeper-colored dry rosés, such as a Tavel from the Rhône or a fuller saignée-style rosé, both described in our rosé guide as darker than pale Provence styles.
• An inexpensive, fruity bottle. Sugar, lemon and strawberries will cover a lot of the wine’s nuance, so this is no place for your best bottle.
• White Zinfandel if you like a sweeter drink; cut back on the sugar or syrup if you use it.

We’d save the most expensive of those for drinking straight and choose a darker, cheaper rosé for the freezer.

Where frosé came from

According to Punch, frosé was introduced at Bar Primi in 2016 by bartender Justin Sievers, who has since become the restaurant’s managing partner. WTOP, which placed the bar in Manhattan’s East Village, reported that it had bought a frozen drink machine for frozen negronis, and that when summer arrived the team decided it was rosé season and tried rosé in it. Punch describes the original as Sicilian rosé, vermouth and strawberry purée spun in the frozen drink machine. A video of Sievers making it went viral, and Punch says it drew hundreds of millions of views on Facebook. Wikipedia notes that the name is simply a contraction of “frozen rosé”.

By that August, WTOP was calling it the frozen drink taking the country by storm, and Bon Appétit had published its recipe that June.

Tips for better frosé

• Freeze in a sealed container, not the wine bottle. Wine expands as it freezes and can push out a cork or crack the glass; our guide to whether you can freeze wine explains why.
• Stir while it freezes. Food & Wine stirs the mix once an hour, and says its strawberry syrup keeps the slush smooth rather than icy.
• Chill the glasses. Food & Wine serves into chilled glasses, so the slush melts more slowly.
• Taste and adjust. Freezing dulls flavor, as Sievers pointed out, so we’d taste the blended slush and add a little more strawberry or lemon if it seems flat.
• Make it lighter. For a pink drink with less alcohol and no freezer time, try a rosé wine spritzer instead.

Note: Frosé goes down like a slushie but carries the alcohol of a glass of wine, more if you add a spirit. Serve it to adults, and keep a non-alcoholic slush going for anyone not drinking.