Today on Food on Fridays is about beverages in Florida. Well, actually, it’s just about two unexpected beverages we’ve found here in Florida over the past week. 

Of course, I’ve already talked about the Arnold Palmer, the blend of lemonade and iced tea that is ubiquitous around here. Both lemonade and sweet iced tea by themselves are also popular drinks.  After being in Florida for almost 2 months it no longer strikes me as odd that just about every place around here offers all 3 of those by default, usually with free refills.

But this past week we ran across a couple of interesting bottled beverages. First up: a bottled iced mocha coffee drink made with almond milk:

Bottle of Cold Brew Coffee with almond milk

Almond milk is pretty trendy at the moment, I guess, sold for people who are lactose intolerant, so it makes sense that they will make and sell anything/everything with it. Anyway, it was a cold coffee drink and we were thirsty, so we decided to try it. Our verdict: it tasted kind of like you were drinking an almond joy candy bar. Not a bad flavor, but not good if you’re looking for the flavor of coffee, as it didn’t taste anything like coffee.

Our second beverage find was in a fish store, of all places.  You see, we stopped in and I saw that they had a fish (salmon trout) that looked like it would be good to make with a Japanese miso sauce. I knew that I had all the ingredients for the sauce at home already, except for mirin, which is a sweetened Japanese sake.  I hadn’t been able to find mirin in the grocery stores a couple of weeks ago, so it was amazing to find a bottle of it available in the fish shop.

However, they only had a huge wine-bottle-sized bottle of it. You only use a bit of it in the recipe, so it seemed like kind of a lot to buy at the moment, since we’re unlikely to use that up before we leave Florida.  But I saw that they also sold bottles of white wine, and in the past I’ve successfully substituted white wine + sugar for the mirin. So, I told Chris that rather than invest in that big bottle that would likely be a year’s supply of mirin, we should just get a bottle of white wine. Then we could drink the rest of it when we ate the fish.  Sounds like a plan, eh?

However, the one problem was I didn’t expect to find an interesting wine for drinking at the fish store. I’m not sure why, particularly when in Italy I was always able to get a nice bottle of wine at the fish store there. But that was Italy where there are lots of vineyards — and this is Florida, where there aren’t.

But then, as I looked at the very limited selection of white wines at this fish store in Melbourne, I spotted something unexpected:

Bottle of Pino Grigio from Mezzacorona

Does that say Mezzacorona?! Those were the vineyards we rode through on the train every time we went took the train south from Bolzano.  The sign for the town of Mezzacorona was also the signal to be on the lookout for  Brigadoon (the mystical castle we always were on the lookout for).  Hard to believe, but here in Melbourne we found a white wine made right around the corner from where we used to live in Italy.  Fun! 

BTW,  I’m happy to report that the Mezzacorona wine worked very well for both sauce and sipping.  An Italian wine in a fish store in Florida? I’ll drink to that!