Wine.
You were probably expecting an over inflated hyperbolic extravaganza of a title for something like wine weren’t you? Well I’m sure the wine was too, and I don’t think it deserves it. Anything that has that much in common with a trash bag filled with fermenting fruit scraps and cough syrup a la prison hooch needs a reality check and its chair kicked out from under it. It ain’t that special.
Pretty bottles, with grandiose arbitrary scoring numbers, and pretentious labels and “flavor” profiles. Please, get over yourself. “Black Cherry, with hints of chocolate, licorice, shoe leather and splintered parquet flooring.”
Delightful.
Have you actually read the descriptions of these bottled frauds? At least box wine has the humility to store itself in a box with a spigot. It knows what it’s there for, it knows its purpose. It didn’t show up to the work site in a turtle neck with horn rimmed glasses and penny loafers with no socks! Box wine showed up ready to rock in Doc Martens and Cargo shorts with 4 hammers and the certainty that everything including your cat Linus was a nail. See, box wine doesn’t take prisoners, it takes livers. Slowly.
Sure wine can be cooked and baked with, sauced with, drunk, probably bathed with if you were in a particularly esoteric mood, and even shaken and sprayed all over people at weddings, parties, and funerals(less acceptable.) But at the end of the day, it’s a beverage, that made not having clean water survivable. Now we’ve refined it to vineyards, and names so pretentious it can cause allergic reactions if you go too deep into Napa Valley, or the parts of France that somehow copyrighted their grapes. Grapes that are special because they grow on hills with a 45% grade instead of a 47% grade, and their handlers are all named Fern. With a long history of being handled by people named Fern. All birthed from Fern the Greater.
Does it need all this?! No. At its core its a drink, not a litmus test for what echelon of society you belong to, nor does it need all this hype. Imagine if someone went on about which fast food restaurants have the best milkshakes? Giving them Parker scores, and talking about how “Well Arby’s milkshakes are clearly superior to McDonalds, AND their machine works far more frequently with less taste of cleaning product residue.” That person would be laughed all the way back to the colorful ball pit they crawled out of.
Oddly enough, let’s return wine to the corner where it belongs, so other people can think about what it did, and discuss wine coolers instead.
Wine coolers. I don’t know why they are called wine coolers. They are not wine, nor are they literal coolers, though they do travel well in them. They are cooler than wine, sure. technically, but still hardly a boast when everything is cooler than wine. Even PBRs and Natty Ice, because the culture surrounding those are far less insufferable, and trucker hats are always more stylish than too tight slacks and matte long sleeves that leave you looking like an ornate No.2 pencil.
Ultimately, wine coolers taste like sugary sodas, with probably too much—way too much in the way of color additives. And you can enjoy both on the couch, or outside, whereas wine requires the prerequisite lofty sigh of “Ahh...” then examining the bottle of arrogantly fermented fruit for descriptors, finding none, then listening to the host or guest blather on about things people only pretend to care about so they don’t feel left out among the others pretending to care.
China has it right. They pour cola into their wine. You have legit schools and degrees where sommeliers learn to be better at selling overpriced wine to people trying to broadcast their wealth. While the most populous country on the planet pours Coca-Cola into that same glass and calls it delicious.
I don’t pretend to draw any specific thing from that, I’ll just say that I find the whole idea:
Refreshing.
-RC
I do enjoy the fine art of sangria crafting, though.