Wine should be fun.
Down with wine snobs!
But I draw the line at silly distractions. A heck of a lot of work goes into good quality, artisan, boutique wines. It feels like an insult to those hard working producers that marketing hooks and chemical, artificial interventions gain attention.
Recently, there have been a number of quirky products come to market. Two examples went viral in recent weeks. But they left me with a sour taste in my mouth, so much so that I didn’t share them myself. Usually I love promoting wine innovations, but these didn’t give me a good feeling.
Cat wine made me catty and the blue wine gave me the blues.
Meowscato proports to be wine for cats. As the owner of a discerning #winecat ($80 Margaret River Chardonnay is his preference) I have very low interest in the product. Wine is not for cats. Cats drink water.
Obviously it is not made by winemakers and has little resemblance to wine other than copycat (sorry) packaging. NEXT!
Second to come across my path, after being shared countless times on social media, is the Blue Wine. This insult to winemakers and wine enthusiasts everywhere, includes artificial sweeteners and some kind of blue dye.
Not appetising to me at all.
Let me count the reasons.
- Artificial sweetener. Eew. The producers couldn’t even use conc* like winemakers do. Why would you even need to add artificial sweetener unless the base beverage was undrinkable.
- Blue dye. Natural apparently but that’s not a colour I want to see in my glass. Mostly becauase no wine vinified properly could every be produced in that colour.
- Unappraisable. When judging wine, step one is to appraise it visually. Clarity, perhaps could be judged. But colour?! Visually you can’t even determine whether it is a white, rose, or red wine because it is none of those. This wine is not possible to be appraised against the usual criteria.
- Gimmicky. None of the marketing speaks of the origin of the grapes. Of the winemaking. Of terroir. Flavour. Technique. Just gimmicks. Eugh, no thanks.
*conc = grape concentrate, aka grape juice, used to add sugar to wine. Usually used very sparingly.
I’m all for a joke, and that is what these products are.
A far, far cry from handcrafted, real, enjoyable products.
Handcrafted, real, enjoyable wines are what I want to spend my time sharing.
Meow indeed.
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Comments make my day – so tell me – What do you think of Meowscato and Blue Wine? Have your say below!