MELTING POINT
Taken from this month’s Cotswold Life magazine
What’s the best way to cool down in the summer sun? A trip to Winstone’s ice cream parlour of course ….
If you’re the sort of person who leaves booking a holiday abroad to the last minute, then this year you’re in luck! As I write, it looks like you’ll be saving your pennies as we bask in yet another mini heatwave.
But, while we may not (yet) be snapping up cheap flights to seek sunnier climes overseas, it appears that those pennies are being spent elsewhere – on ice cream to be precise. Yes, the temperatures may have rivalled those in Ibiza in June (according to the papers), but here in the UK, we’re just not used to such highs. With a distinct lack of swimming pools and air conditioning in most of our homes, what’s a person got to do to cool down? Eat ice cream, apparently. And lots of it! So much so that supermarkets have just reported record ice cream sales and the summer has only just begun.
At Warner’s we always see a spike in demand when temperatures get to the mid 20s, and that demand increases exponentially the hotter it gets. But like any food product, not all ice creams are created equally. There’s nothing wrong with stocking your freezer with Wall’s to keep the kids happy, but if you want to really enjoy your ice cream, then you’ve got to go local.
Luckily, we do have some genuinely fantastic ice cream producers in the Cotswolds, but perhaps the most well-known is Winstone’s with its picturesque parlour nestled amongst the wandering cows and horses of Rodborough Common near Stroud.
Celebrating its 100 anniversary this year, it’s also a huge local success story. That story began in 1925 when entrepreneur Albert Winstone founded the business to offer cold treats to the golfers and walkers who passed by. Responding to consumer demand for ice cream, Albert managed to acquire a Victorian recipe and after a lot of trial and error, Winstone’s ice cream was born.
Today, the parlour attracts around 180,000 visitors a year, and on a busy summer weekend there might be 5,000 people through the door. Those are phenomenal figures for a business that began from the side car of a motorcycle!
Four generations later, Winstone’s is run by Albert’s grandson Tom Vear who has steered the business into the 21st century with a rebrand and fresh new flavours – 17 to be precise. However, the ethos of Winstone’s remains ‘quintessentially Gloucestershire’, with a new partnership for milk to be supplied by Jess’ Organic Dairy Farm, another fantastic Cotswold supplier, honey from Stroud and fruit from Herefordshire.
To mark the centenary, Tom also introduced a new flavour – peaches and cream – that, just like all the other ice creams, is made to the same Victorian recipe used by Albert on the very first day Winstone’s began. Some things it seems, are just too good to change.
