The Wine Fairy

Every Wine Person (every Wine Person that I respect, anyway) has the same motto: Drink what you like.

It’s true that learning is useful and exploring is enlightening. Wine tastes often drift over time, and they tend to evolve in a predictable way–often away from sweetness and toward nuance and complexity.

But it’s dumb and presumptuous to try and talk someone out of their stated preferences. You may love chocolate-flavored wine–at this point in your wine journey, or forever–and it’s totally groovy if you do.

Wine writers and wine critics have a difficult line to walk. We’re trying to arrive at a fair assessment of quality without yucking anybody’s yum. It’s your palate, after all. The best service we can do is describe something accurately enough that you, the reader, can figure out if you’re likely to enjoy it or not.

But on the other hand: Oof. There are some real turds out there. Keeping up the facade of relativism is easy enough, until you get some manipulated, insipid, objectively odd-tasting plonk in your glass.

Which brings me to the penultimate bottle in the Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar. Its complete name is a mouthful: Once Upon A Time Chocolate Red Grape Wine with Natural Truffet [?] and Artificial Toffee Flavors and Artificial Color.

Feeling thirsty yet?

The Label

For perhaps the first time in this review series, words have failed me. So here is what the bottle says:

“This chocolate red wine offers intense aromas of dark, ripe fruit, complemented by sweet vanilla notes and refined noble hints of chocolate. The result is a rich and indulgent wine with a sophisticated and harmonious flavor profile.”

The Tasting

Gosh. This tastes just about as good as that AI-slop label text sounds.

It looks like a regular red wine–no murky brown tint, no sugary tears.

But it smells like scented erasers and butterscotch baking chips. The bizarre vanillin-toffee flavor additive lands somewhere in between putty and pudding. (Putting?)

Hold your nose, and it amounts to a medium-sweet red wine…the same sort of anonymous middling red blend that’s been showing up in the advent calendar all December long. Candy-like fruit flavors–but little structure or character. The gummy fake-vanilla taste lingers at the end of each sip, like a scratch-n-sniff sticker adhered to the wine’s surface.

This chocolate wine doesn’t taste like chocolate or wine. It’s just weird, artificial, and completely unnecessary. The 10% alcohol by volume isn’t even enough to get you buzzed on this goop.

I have been holding out hope for the Costco Wine Advent-ure calendar until the very last minute. I’m opening the final bottle tomorrow. The average grade is hovering somewhere around a C-minus.

I don’t understand why it has to be that way. This is 2025–aren’t there tons of good quality grapes going unharvested or unsold? Couldn’t we buy up some of that stuff and put it in half-bottles with cute seasonal labels on them?

I am absolutely the target market for Costco’s wine grab bag: Adventurous, thrifty, and broadly tolerant of wines across the flavor spectrum. Nothing is off limits.

Chocolate wine? Sure! I’ve been known to have a wee dram of Chocovine or even Buzzballz Choco Chiller if the occasion arises. All the big-box stores sell a ton of chocolate-flavored wine-based liqueurs around the holidays. It’s fine. It makes people happy.

But tasting Once Upon A Time Chocolate Red is an experience that I just can’t recommend to anyone. Even curiosity is not a good enough reason to uncork this wine-adjacent substance.

Bottle: Once Upon A Time Chocolate Red Grape Wine with Natural Truffet [pretty sure that’s not a real word] and Artificial Toffee Flavors and Artificial Color (NV) – France

Costco Wine Advent-ure Calendar Number: 23

Grade: D-

Finish the bottle? Nooooooo.

I’m tasting all 24 wines in the 2025 Costco Wine Advent-ure calendar! See previous reviews here.

Review disclosure: I was not compensated or provided any free products for this review. Opinions expressed on The Wine Fairy blog are entirely my own.