What is there to say, really, about Mad Dog Red Grape. It's legendary-- one of the best-known bumwines in the world. It's the most basic, pseudo-wine flavor I've got this week too (Red. Banana. Fuck.). So this is where we start, this is the first step on our journey downward to liver failure and oblivion. And I'm already one White Russian in to the night. Cheers.
Long is the road, and hard.
I would also accept
I carry Hell within Myself.
LOOK
Dark red, pseudo-merlot. No real bubbles around the rim like real wine has (yes. Yes I will hold it to that standard). But if you hold it up to the light there's a real candy redness that most wine doesn't have. Night Train fully looked like hobo-wine and cranberry juice, but MD tries to disguise it. MD tries to look like real wine, only to have the cancer lurking within it revealed as the skin of decency sloughs off, revealing the pulsing mass of sin and disappointment.
I am so, so sorry.
NOSE
Well, it does smell vaguely like wine, which I don't think anything in the rest of the week will. But there's also a smell that reminds me of dying eggs as a child-- a hot smell of vinegar and beets, with a really faint eggy sulphrous whiff underneath it. Which is ironic, as the MD stands for Mogen David-- the star of David. So I associate what I guess what designed to be wine for Shabbas Hoboes with the religion that supplanted Judaism.
I don't know what I'm getting at, but I'm sure that I could make a good argument for MD's aroma as both a hate crime and a crucifixion.
TASTE
Wow. I mean, it tastes a little like wine, and a little like the sugary hobo-wine I've had in the past. The worst elements of Argentinian Merlot (I still have that bottle, by the way. Except for a scallion-mushroom sauce, I have not touched it since the review) and Night Train. This makes me honest-to-god miss Night Train. There's that artificial Robitussin sweetness and a vinegar harshness. I didn't think it would be this bad-- I might actually prefer the bling-bling blue raspberry. It's gonna be interesting to see how the other MD variants throughout the week build on this basic formula of failure and cancer. The buzz is more a defeated lethargy than anything fun.
(Holy fuck, Karim just poured a shot of banana hitler into his. He says it makes it taste more like actual wine. I gotta try this).
Update: Yep. It's an improvement. A little less Jacquin's maybe, but it actually does add a sweetness and fruitiness that makes it taste more like...Night Train. I am actually going to recommend Night Train here. I did not think that MD basic would be this bad, but it really, really is. This is actually nurturing a love in me for other hobo wines, which is fucking terrifying. It is turning me into a scarred-ass, traumatized man, marked forever by my sins and habits.
Yes. Yes, Cronenberg. He is the new mascot of the blog.
KARIM'S ASSESSMENT
Karim's comment on the taste is particularly enlightening-- it tastes the way engine fluid smells. Simultaneously sugary and carcinogenic. He also comments that the drunken buzz it gives you is like having your head stuck in a trash compactor, and I can't help but picture the something just touched my leg trash compactor from-- fuck, you know where it's from. He also just mentioned "the ballsweat of a dude who lives in his mother's basement kind of bitter," and says that the buzz is really angry and brooding. Darcy-style.The term jewblood just got thrown around. He says his final thoughts are that the buzz is like hospital anesthesia and his girlfriend broke up with him and his mother died.
I googled "angry persian," since there's not a camera.
TOM WAITS SONG THAT BEST EXEMPLIFIES MY CURRENT STATE OF DRUNKEN DERANGEMENT: "The Bottom of the World."
Well I dined last night with Scarface Ron
On Telapia fish cakes and fried black swan
Razorweed onion and peacock squirrel
And I dreamed all night about a beautiful girl
And I'm lost
And I'm lost
I'm lost at the bottom of the world
What? If I were to break up with Karim for hobo wine, I would have done that long ago. Can't speak for his mother, though.
ReplyDeleteAlso, tilapia. That is how it is spelled.