From Ugly Fruit to Delicious Cocktail: Passion Fruit Spritzer
by Claire Thomas
PHOTO: Claire Thomas
My grandmother used to have an epic passion fruit vine, fat with fruit. We’d collect the pockmarked nubs and shake them to see if they were ripe. The trick with passionfruit is that the uglier it is, the better it tastes. We’d collect buckets of them and my mom would scoop out the pulp on top of a pavlova. My sister, who was obsessed with sour sweets, would simply scoop a little sugar on an open halve and eat its contents with a spoon.
The flavor is hard to describe, but I can always tell when it’s cut with pineapple or mango juice. It’s sour, with a pleasant lemon-y pucker, and a distinctly tropical flavor. It’s somewhere between mango, pineapple, and guava but very much its own thing.
My grandmother used to have an epic passion fruit vine, fat with fruit. We’d collect the pockmarked nubs and shake them to see if they were ripe. The trick with passionfruit is that the uglier it is, the better it tastes. We’d collect buckets of them and my mom would scoop out the pulp on top of a pavlova. My sister, who was obsessed with sour sweets, would simply scoop a little sugar on an open halve and eat its contents with a spoon.
The flavor is hard to describe, but I can always tell when it’s cut with pineapple or mango juice. It’s sour, with a pleasant lemon-y pucker, and a distinctly tropical flavor. It’s somewhere between mango, pineapple, and guava but very much its own thing.
I noticed that passion fruit’s distinct flavor pops up in New Zealand sauvignon blancs quite a bit. I don’t know why, but that tart, tropical note wafts around in the bottle, undercut with chalky minerality and the green taste of fresh cut grass. When thinking up a simple white wine spritzer recipe, those flavors immediately came to mind. I love using the wine as the inspiration for the flavor profile, so if you can, try to find a wine with those similar tropical notes. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
NOTE: For 2 pitchers
1 bottle sauvignon blanc
1 lime sliced
2 passion fruit, pulp scooped out
12 ounces soda
Directions:
Combine the wine and fruit in the bottom of each pitcher, and top off with soda. Add ice and stir!
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