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What Is This Thing? Giambellino Bellini Wine Cocktail
This is what it’s like to write a highbrow-lowbrow wine blog: Sometimes we’re drinking a single-vineyard Pinot Noir, and sometimes we’re drinking a dubious orange liquid that we bought at ALDI. On What Is This Thing?, we look at various wine-adjacent products and try to determine: 1. What is this thing? 2. Should you drink…
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What Is This Thing? Fratelli Alessandria Barolo Chinato (NV)
It’s a wide, wide world of wine out there and there’s no way to taste it all in many lifetimes. I’m basically resigned to that fact. But even so, a completionist impulse lurks within the heart of every wine lover. So if I see something novel on a wine list or back bar, you can…
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What Is This Thing? El Tuerto Tempranillo Blanco Rioja (2022)
Driven by curiosity (and captive to novelty), it’s time for us to uncork another strange little wine bottle: A white Tempranillo from Rioja. White Tempranillo? Yeah, that’s right. Like Pinot Noir and Grenache before it, the premier black grape of Spain has lately spawned an albino cousin. (Yes, I know that productive vines can’t technically…
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What Is This Thing? Buzzballz Choco Chiller
Welcome to another edition of What Is This Thing?, in which your intrepid wine blogger reviews wine-adjacent, wine-ish, and not-quite-wine products. Fact: Despite their liquor-shooter appearance and sexually suggestive names, Buzzballz Chillers are technically wine. “Orange Wine With Cream & Natural Flavors,” to be precise. It’s all part of Buzzballz’s unique genius, and one of…
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What Is This Thing? Tinto de Sol Calimocho
Welcome to the first installment of What Is This Thing?, in which we try odd bottles from the periphery of the world of wine. Today I’m tasting Tinto de Sol Calimocho. Is it wine? The label helpfully describes it as an “aromatized wine-product cocktail.” So, yes? Let’s get into it! Calimocho (also spelled Kalimoxto) is…