The Last Review: Pinnacle Whipped Cream and Chocolate Vodka

Goodbye my brothers, my loves, my followers and the cheerleaders of my destruction. It has been a beautiful year and change, a beautiful series of terrible liquors and wines and beers. And this is the last review. I need to keep my liver, and I'm writing twice a week at The Triumph now. If you've enjoyed the ride here, please check out the work I'm doing there-- this has been a hobby, but The Triumph is my passion and my love. I'll have a full farewell post and a real goodbye up here soon, but here is the last review. I love you all and hope you all are happy.

So here it is: the vodka-that-is-not-vodka, something that represents everything wrong with cheap mass-market vodka for people who don't understand why you drink vodka. I was told that I should try the whipped-cream vodka because it was the epitome of "not vodka marketed at teenage girls." So, let us mourn the end of an era and the disgrace that this bullshit brings to a proud alcoholic culture by reviewing it and immersing ourselves in the darkest parts of that culture we can.

Boris Grebenshikov!

LOOK
Well, it's clear. The label has a dollop of whipped cream and a generic Hershey's kiss on it, making it clear that this isn't even going to taste like good chocolate. According to the label, they import the vodka from France and then infuse it in Maine, which is...horrifying. With the exception of Grey Goose, which I really like, I don't think the French quite understand the point of vodka-- they make Ciroc out of grapes, for christ's sake. And even the people who don't go for the strong, peppery, harsh beauty of vodka-- that stark Russian beauty, that alcoholic Raskolnikovian seething --even they think that this chocolate cream shit is only for Americans.

This vodka is the equivalent of the pawnbroker's retarded sister.

The label design is pretty bad, too-- it's a translucent sticker with visible adhesive. Can I just say here that this is the same price range as Smirnoff, but that Smirnoff has some of my favorite label design in vodka? Seriously, their really-Russian redesign as of late is really gorgeous. This...is not. The bottle shape is nice, but...the label looks like 5-dollar vodka. Nikolai has a better label.

HOLY SHIT, when you pour it into a glass this thin layer of flavored oil rises to the top. That is... I've never seen that before. What a catastrophic failure. What the hell just happened here? This makes less sense than the second 5-year-plan

NOSE

It smells like condensed milk. It smells sweeter than whipped cream or chocolate. It's so wretched and wrong that it essentially keeps heaping sugar on there like the way that kids' cereal is just essentially glue and artificial sweeteners because that is the only way to trick kids into thinking it's good. It smells like Cocoa Pebbles covered in condensed milk. And then with pancake syrup over that. It's something awful and wretched that covers itself with false beauty. Like how St. Petersburg uses the gold of its domes to distract from the pallid faces of its starving citizens.

Shot in a duel because he was never able to convince himself he deserved his wife.

There's still that poisonous alcohol tinge under it, though, burning under the bottom. And while that can be a nice element of certain vodka flavors, it doesn't marry with the cream and the sugar and the candy flavors-- that alcoholic burn in no way matches the rest of the flavors, and that disconnect makes it clear that this was designed as an insult to actual vodka and a candy-ass attempt to get people drink who in no way understand the good things in this world. It exists in a bizarre culture where there's no real joy, just hollow "fun" and a secret sickness no one will admit.

God, it has been so goddamn fun writing this blog. Thank you.

TASTEIt tastes like the worst White Russian ever. There's no real chocolate flavor here, just really artificial sugar. It tastes like (I'm just assuming here, having no real-- well, no remembered experience) breast milk and splenda.

"We are all whores here, we drink as deep as moths." --A. Akhmatova, wondrous drunk

It's that really chemical sweetness that a lot of this bad booze has, the kind that coats your mouth and clings to it like you've just chugged some olive oil. Only this clinging sweet oil tastes like milk. Sort of. It actually tastes vaguely curdled-- sticky and spoiled and pungent. Well, not spoiled, just sour-sweet, like buttermilk.

Again, there's no chocolate here. It just tastes like extra sugar.  It's like how someone who doesn't like coffee tries to drink it through syrups and flavors and bullshit starbucks orders, only with vodka instead of coffee. This tastes like an office drone trying to get drunk and hide it by just mixing his vodka with non-dairy creamer and Splenda. With that acrid simmer of bitterness and bile that stands out as a separate flavor from the rest, like a tumor clinging to the underside of the sweetness and the milk. Like, there's a line in the Mountain Goats "Missouri" "Spent a long time staring at the residue / blood, milk, and oil." That's what this actually tastes like.

On the plus side, the sugar and alcohol make it a great preservative.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I'm glad I got to end with this one. It's not the worst, but there's been no liquor yet that missed the point of liquor so quickly. This tastes like a sorority party, like the absolute absence of joy in alcohol. This is no Malort, no Banana Hitler or T-Bird, but it's... I can't think of a reason why you'd ever want this. It's just straight-up bad, there's nothing fun or special here-- it's mass-produced sugary syrupy mediocrity and filth and the joyless underbelly of American liquor.

Thank you for your love and support. Thank you for encouraging me in these goddamn bad ideas and this vodka that tastes like Mother Russia's breast milk. You've been a wonderful audience, and this has been a terrible bottle.

DSCH's terror-grin under the boot of pure evil pretty much epitomizes it. It's been a year of bumwine and living like the 3rd quartet.