Friday, April 30, 2010

Night Train Express (and cult film spectacular!)

People, I am in a damn good mood. Classes are over, just finished my last paper, and I've only got two exams coming up. Life is doing pretty well. The Cruellest Month is pretty much over, and things are going great.

Let's see how quick Night Train can fuck that up.

It hurtses our liver.

So yeah. Does it need much of an introduction? It's bottled by Gallo, the same people who brought us Thunderbird. It's a legendary bum wine, and apparently gives you a comatose buzz rather than a frenzied one.

So all aboard--train's headed down, and let's see how far it goes (spoiler: it crashes)

LOOK
No wine should be this color. It's not pink. It's not red. It's some weird fucking purple color in-between the two. Mauve, I guess. No, wait, more like mulberry.

Anyway, this is a really unnatural color. This is the wine equivalent of the Uncanny Valley--not light or dark enough in either way to look natural or edible. It looks manufactured and wrong--not clearly gutrot like the MD Blue Raspberry was, but a little examination and the facade of respectability peels away to reflect the horrible artificiality.

I've drunk things you people wouldn't believe.

NOSE
A pretty strong candy smell here. This is the first non-blue-raspberry fortified wine I've chugged down, but it still smells surprisingly like red Jolly Ranchers or Hawaiian Punch. I'm really disheartened by how little this smells like grapes, or even vinegar. Just from the smell alone, it hardly seems like it actually counts as--
"citrus wine and natural flavors."

Oh god. Oh god. It's not actually wine. It's-- even MD puts "grape" somewhere on its label. This is-- this-- wow. This is actually fundamentally broken on some level of reality. This is just wrong, and there is no one on earth who would say otherwise.
Meh, at least he's not drinking Night Train.

TASTE
I gotta say, I kinda like the fact that this is clearly designed to be chugged by the bottle. That is the only thing I like though. It's incredibly sweet--like, NyQuil sweet--designed to suppress the bitterness of the terrible, terrible alcohol. It's like a beautiful woman who also happens to sweat poison-- she may be pretty, but you feel even more betrayed because her one redeeming feature is designed solely to hide the pure destructive evil.

Yes, I know that metaphor didn't make sense. Screw you. I've been drinking.

I don't have a problem, you have a problem...with me!

Well fine. Fuck you too. I don't need you, I have Night-- oh god. God, I'm sorry.

Look, it's just bad. It tastes hypersweet, like a child's punch with merlot poured in and some extra sugar added for good measure. It's not as bad as Mad Dog Bling Bling, but the basic thing is that it's designed as hobo wine, every part of it is calculated solely to rot away your cortex and destroy your stomach. It may be charming, but it's still a killer, and the charm only exists to cover that up.

No no no, less likable, more poisonous.


That's more like it.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Honestly though, if you really wanna get drunk, this might be your best per-dollar bet. It's at least drinkable, even if it tastes like cough syrup, hawaiian punch, and gasoline. It's hobo wine, pure and simple. This is the kind of thing this blog was founded for, and it may be the first thing I've reviewed that I would actually consider buying again if I was really, really desperate to get absolutely smashed.

Not that it's good. Oh no. It's fucking cancer. But it's more like lymph cancer than, say, ball cancer (Jacquin's).
Aww. I made myself sad.

Speaking of Bum Wine: week of Mad Dog. Soon. Summer. Gonna be pretty much a pilgrimage to Hell and partway back.

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