Cork Free! Rose' Bubbles in a Can!

Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to the Wine Pair podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wines, and this is my wife and wine-tasting partner in crime Carmela. And we are the Wine Pair. Say hello, Carmela.

In today’s episode, we are going cork free! And not just cork free, but bottle free! That’s right. No bottles. But it ain’t boxed wine, it’s wine in a can! What?!? Wine in a can? I can just see your dad rolling his eyes at us now, Carmela! 

We will have a whole series of episodes on wines that ain’t got no corks, and sometimes don’t even have no bottles! And those are some of our favorites. And, we’ll help you determine if there are some wines with no corks that are worth your time - like wines in a can or a box. But, I’ll give you the punchline early - they are worth it!!! At least some of them are worth it. One of my favorite sauvignon blancs comes in a screw cap, but that’s for another episode (or two). 

So, let’s tell you a little story about how this episode came about. A few months ago, for our anniversary, we traveled to Hawaii, and rather than going to Maui, which we’ve been to a few times, we went to Waikiki! Never been to Honolulu before. 

What did you think of Waikiki and Honolulu, Carmela?

I decided to book our trip to Honolulu because for our anniversary I wanted to balance what you like with what I like in vacations. I like vacations with some action, and yes, mostly museums because I am a dork. Which you hate. (I think you are being polite and a good sport because I love them and I could spend all day in them.)

And you like vacations with water and sand, which I find very, very boring. Why do you like the beach so much?

Well, in Honolulu, we learned a couple of really cool things. 

• First, we learned that I like pools that are not on the ground floor! The place we stayed, called the Halepuna, had a pool on the 8th floor, and it was amazing! What did you like about it because I know what I liked?
  • The pool attendants who took care of everything
  • The quiet and calm of an 8th floor pool
  • The bar, the privacy, etc.
  • Never done anything like that before
• Second, and maybe more importantly, we learned that we like canned wine! OMG! And I am a wine snob, but we liked fricking canned wine! And here is why: 
  • We like to drink our wine, but sometimes, opening up a bottle is a commitment.You feel like you have to finish the bottle. Finishing a can, though, big deal!
  • And we love our sparkling, but again, sometimes opening a bottle feels like a bit much.
  • But cans?!? YASS. Fucking brilliant

Ok, so close to the Halepuna, like right around the corner, is a big ABC store. Now, there are a million ABC stores in Hawaii and Honolulu, but his ABC store was amazeballs, and it was big, and it was practically next door. When we were there, we went to the wine section, of course, to find some bubbly or something we wanted to drink, and what did we find but canned wine! At first, I thought what you all thought - that sounds like some shit!!! But, to our surprise and delight, we liked the canned wine. Specifically, the canned bubbly. And even more specifically, the canned rose bubbly.

Now, I am not a big rose fan, but I do like myself some bubbly rose. Bubbly rose is good. Well, I just like bubbly in general. But put bubbles and rose together?!? Holy crappoly!

So, what’s up with canned wine? Let me tell you why canned wine is awesome, or at least, has the potential to be. We’ll let you know if the wines we are drinking today are worth the cash. Ok, here is why canned wine rocks:

• For one, canned wine won’t break. No bottles to break, no bottles to clink. Just aluminum.
• Next, canned wine is easy to carry. Let’s face it, bottles are heavy and awkward. Cans? Easy to carry. Easy to hide. Plus, if you forget your wine opener, guess what? No fucking problem!
• And, that is another reason canned wine is fucking awesome - it’s easy to store, and fits great in your fridge! How many refrigerators come with places to put cans of soda (or do you call it pop)? And how many come with places to put your wine? That’s right - refrigerators are made to hold cans. They stack well.
• Another reason, for wine geeks, is that canned wine takes care of two things that can fuck up your wine - corks and light. You need to store your wine in dark places because light can change the taste and quality of your wine. And corks can go bad! We’ll spend some time in another cork free episode going through the problem with corks, but let’s just leave it at this - a wine with no cork can’t be corked
• The final reason is that cans hold more wine than you think! A regular sized can is half a bottle of wine! 

I mean, after this, why wouldn’t you just want your wine in a can? Well, the snobs out there will always have a reason to hate on anything that breaks with tradition. So, people will look down their nose at wines that are not in glass bottles with corks and that’s too bad,, but too bad for them. 

Ok, so let’s get to it, because that has been a lot of talking! Today, we are going to try three canned sparkling roses and we’ll let you know, using our 10 point amazing rating scale, if these are worth your time. I have sneaking suspicion that the answer will be - if you are on a vacation or out having fun, a canned wine is probably going to be ok. But we’ll see. A couple of these we have had before, but we’ve generally had them in sort of informal situations. So now we are really going to put them to the test. 

Remember, our tasting ratings are just a method for you to determine your own taste versus our. We don’t expect you all to agree with us all the time. What we do expect is that you will soon be able to determine if your taste in wine is the same as ours. And if yours is different - great! No problem. I mean, it just means that your taste in wine is bad, but, you know, you have to buy and enjoy what you like. And if that is different from us, no worries! We still like you. 

After we go through our tasting, we’ll go through what some of the expected flavors are for a sparkling rose. We want to do our own tasting from our own experiences with food and drink and not bias what we taste in the wine with what we are “supposed” to taste. Camela is going to take some notes, and we will see how we did. 

Ok, let’s get to it!!!  

Wines

Underwood Sparkling Rose

Region: Oregon

Producer: Union Wine company (Underwood is their brand for everyday drinking wines!)

Year: NV

Price: $5.79 can (No rating), so just under $12 per bottle equivalent

Retailer: Total Wine

11% alcohol

56% Pinot Gris, 37% Pinot Noir, 6% Riesling & 1% Chardonnay

Rating: Joe 7  Carmela 8

House Wine Sparkling rose

Region: Columbia Valley in Washington State

Producer: Charles Smith Wines (they make a lot of other wines like Kung Fu Girl riesling that we really like and just did an episode about)

Year: NV

Price: $4.49 can (No rating) about $9 per bottle equivalent

Retailer: Total Wine

12% alcohol

Chardonnay, Pinot Noir (?)

Rating: Joe  7 Carmela 7

14 Hands Unicorn sparkling rose

Region: Washington state

Producer: 14 Hands

Year: NV

Price: $4.29 can (No rating) about $8.50 per bottle equivalent

Retailer: Total Wine

13% alcohol

“Rare rose blend” whatever that means

Rating  Joe 8 Carmela 8

The classic flavor profile for a sparkling rose differ a bit based on whether or not the wine is on the sweeter side or on the drier brut side. Remember, whether or not a sparkling wine is sweet or dry is confusing. Sparkling wines called dry are sweet - because they add sugar to them. And Sparkling wines that are brut are what we would call dry because they don’t add sugar to them. It all has to do with whether extra sugar is added. 

Now, we will talk about this in future episodes, but rose is too broad of a category to talk about how it tastes. It all depends on what kind of grapes the wine is made from, and how it is produced. But, we’ll deal in some generalities here

• For sweeter sparkling roses, flavors tend to be red berry, raspberry, and strawberry
• For drier sparkling roses, flavors tend to be grapefruit, rose petals, and even rhubarb
• Rose champagne can taste like strawberries dipped in cream
• Sometimes you will also taste things like smoke, toast, spice, and crushed rocks

So, here are the wines again, and whether we think you should buy them or not. Let’s recheck our ratings. 

If you have ideas for wines you would like us to try and give you advice on for future podcasts, let us know. You can visit our website at thewinepairpodcast.com and leave a voice message or send us a note. You can comment or reach out on Instagram or Twitter - on Instagram you can find us at thewinepairpodcast, and on Twitter at winepairpodcast (no “the” on twitter ‘cause it don’t fit). You can reach out to us at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and we just hope to hear you comments. And we hope you’ll subscribe and follow us

Thanks for listening to the Wine Pair podcast, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.