Water into Wine(flavored)

We live in exciting times, as far as food goes. Or, more correctly, as far as "food" goes, as I'm not sure some of the things I am often excited about in the grocery store actually qualify as "food", technically. I'm not talking about things like exotic fruit from the far side of the world or a soup you've never tried or a new sauce for chicken. I'm talking about things like Peeps milk, or Cheelows, or the return to popularity of exotic Jello molds and desserts. And, yes, I'm also talking about Wal-Mart's wine-flavored water enhancers.

Earlier this week a friend posted an article about them on Facebook, but the article didn't seem to know that Rose Wine isn't the only flavor. When I made an actual trip to Walmart on Friday night (because that's the kind of fun we get into around here on a Friday night), I discovered that they also make a Berry Sangria flavor. As a person who drinks water all day long at my desk, and a person who likes wine, I decided that I needed to try these.

But also that I needed some actual wine to compare them to, in order to properly evaluate the flavor.

I'm told that day drinking wine alone in your apartment on the weekend is a sign of several different but severe problems, so I immediately rationalized two good excuses:

1) I have to drink this in order to properly blog about it. I am performing a service for my few dozen readers. Taking one for the team. Some kind of sports metaphor. I'm not day drinking alone on the couch. I'm [SPORTS METAPHOR HERE] for my friends and readers.

2) If you have wine with a cheese plate, you're not drinking; you're fancy. The $5 and under cheese bin at Kroger was happy to help me with this, so I assembled a cheese plate with some crackers and accompaniments (by which I mean jelly, to keep the cheese from sliding off the cracker) and prepared for my taste test.



Said preparation consisted of letting the cheese sit out for an hour and getting out two glasses.

Like I said, fancy.

I decided to start with the Rose Wine flavor, as that was the one discussed in the article.



(If you're wondering why the wine glass has a bicentennial design on it, all of my barware comes from a matched set that was in my Nanny Maggie's house. No one else wanted it, and I have successfully move it three times now without breaking any.)

I wasn't sure how much flavoring to add to just one glass of water (at work I have a water bottle, so I'm flavoring a much larger quantity), so I figured for a proper test I would go ahead and add flavoring until it was about the same color as the actual rose wine spritzer I bought at Walmart.

(Yes, I bought wine at Walmart. As I said, fancy.)



Before sipping, I attempted to savor the bouquet, but the rose-flavored water had no smell at all. It really did taste like wine, although without the noticeable bite/sting of alcohol. I'm not saying it tasted like good wine, mind you. It tasted more like I imagine the wine that Schmendrick makes in "The Last Unicorn" tastes; weak, non-offensive, but definitely something wine-flavored. If you were blindfolded and given a glass of this, I'm fairly confident you'd be able to guess "wine" as the flavor, but not a specific kind of wine.

Satisfied that I had properly evaluated the rose flavor, I slammed the remainder of the glass of rose and cleansed my pallet with several bites of cheese and crackers. Then we moved on to the Berry Sangria flavor:



Like the first test, I added enough until the colors matched:



and then sipped the actual wine, and then the water, to compare.

The berry sangria water has a faint smell of berries. I wondered if maybe I hadn't added enough flavor to the first one, or if maybe I was tipsy from the first round. (Confession: I drank all the wine from the first round, but only a couple sips of the water.) Even more importantly, though, it definitely tasted like the sangria. Out of the two flavors, I would say this one is definitely the better choice if you want to sit at your desk and pretend that you are slowly drinking your day away.

Or if you just like the taste of wine.

It's also good for that.

A Taste of Jersey

It's no secret among my friends that I enjoy the finer things in life: good cheese, fine wine, and repeated viewings of "The Real Housewives" of every city except for Miami, Vancouver, and that God-awful boring mess that was the one season of DC. (I have nothing against the Vancouver version; it just doesn't air here and I haven't bothered trying to find it online.)

My favorites are New York and Beverly Hills, but I'm still down with the O.G. Orange County Girls, and I have a love/hate relationship with New Jersey, as passive aggressive toward that section of the franchise as New Jersey Housewife and former Vegas stripper Jacqueline is toward her ambitionless hair-pulling daughter, Ashlee. Sometimes I like the show, and sometimes I want the show to go live with its biological father and never appear on camera again.

Still, I was excited to discover a Real Housewives of New Jersey-related product tonight at Earthfare when I stopped to get that fancy exfoliating relaxation soap that I like:



Blk. Water, the beverage that adorable disappointment Albie, hyperactive youngest child Chritoffer, third musketeer and sassy homosexual Greg, and Jacqueline's long suffering husband Uncle Chris have been hawking and promoting on the show for the last two seasons. As a somewhat suggestible shopper (I did, after all, buy Hostess cakes because Green Lantern told me to, and then there's the whole story of the James Blunt CD and VH1 that I'm vaguely ashamed to share), I spent approximately two seconds thinking, "Oh my God! Black water!" and then shoving it into my basket.

I've been curious about the Blk. water since they started promoting it. It's black because it has "fulvic trace minerals" in it. After several minutes of searching on the internet I still have no idea what those are or if I actually need them, but according to the bottle there are "over 77 trace minerals and electrolytes essential to health and wellness" in every bottle.

Oddly enough, though, the bottle also says that it contains 0% of the recommended daily allowance of anything.

I guess they really are just traces of minerals.

On the other hand, it looks exactly like I expect water from New Jersey to look. It doesn't smell like it, though. In fact, it doesn't smell like anything. It's also not black, although it is very dark:



It's more of a dark, dark brown, the color of flat Coca Cola. Pouring it into a much fancier glass than it deserved, I swirled it beneath my nose, hoping to catch a hint of the bouquet. Like I said, though, it didn't smell like anything. It also doesn't taste like anything. It's water. It tastes like water. The only interesting thing about it was the hidden writing on the bottle:



Overall, I'm not impressed.

Which is often how I feel while watching "The Real Housewives of New Jersey".