What is it?
This can wine is a carbonated rosé wine from Healdsburg, California. It comes in pink and is available in single, 375ML cans.
What’s good about it?
Yeah, of course I was attracted, like a moth to a flame, to the pink can. I’m nothing if not consistent in my attraction to things packaged in pink. I have to put my hands up here and confess that I don’t like rosé wine.
Where to origin of this comes from I am not sure. Maybe it’s because my real introduction to wine happened when working for Laithwaite’s Wine in the UK. I was surrounded by people who had wine training and wine experience and, in many cases, wine snobbery. Rosé wine suffers from a very low reputation and perhaps I was influenced by this.
Or maybe because a lot of rosé wine isn’t that great. Nor, I think, is it meant to be. It’s meant to be a easy-drinking wine that you enjoy cold on a hot summer’s day. Indeed, in England rosé wine is so synonymous with summer, fine weather, and BBQs that the first sign of sun and heat, people flood markets and wine retailers demanding to know where the rosé is.
Visit a wine shop late on a hot summer’s day in England and the rosé wine section will be picked over, decimated and sad. Personally, I think rosé wine just tends to lack direction. It’s not red, it’s not white. Yes, I like the color, but I find the taste flat and sometimes sour and very acidic and it just really doesn’t do it for me.
But the can was pink so, yeah, sold. Also this can wine is sold by the can (as opposed to a 4-pack or 6-pack) so it’s not a huge commitment. And at 375ML (or half a bottle of wine) and 12% ABV it’s a relatively large and fairly high alcohol option. So if you need wine fast it’s going to be able to deliver that.
What does it taste like?
The short answer is: it tastes like rosé wine (see above).
The longer answer is that, when I was doing my training for my wine certifications (what are these? See here), I learned that when you can taste the alcohol as an aftertaste, or that there isn’t good integration of the alcohol and the flavour (i.e. the tastes just don’t combine) that it means something about the wine.
I can’t remember what this means… something like the fruit is unripe or the wine hasn’t been left to do it’s wine thing for long enough. Anyways, it isn’t good and it doesn’t taste good either.
The relevant point here is that there is a strong taste of alcohol and the, frankly, unpleasant taste of bad rosé wine, which makes drinking this wine more of a ‘I just want to have wine inside me’ proposition than an enjoyable one. The wine itself tastes like all that I don’t like about rosé wine. Really acidic, and with that fruity bite that is typical of rosé. But at least its sparkling.
What isn’t good about it?
The pink can is great, the option to buy only one is great, the fact that its sparkling is great, the high alcohol content (in the right circumstances) is great. However, it just isn’t a great tasting wine. I immediately didn’t like it and begrudgingly finished the entire can.
Would I buy it again?
Only to make sure I really don’t like it. I might drink it again depending on the circumstances. Like, if it was Carlo Rossi or this can wine, I would drink this can wine. If I needed a can wine for the road and this was the only can wine option, I would drink this can wine. If the other can wines on the shelf were worse than this can wine, then I would buy and drink this can wine. But there’s so many more other really great cans of wine out there in the world that I would be hesitant to shell out my money for this can wine again.
House Wine Rosé Bubbles Quick Facts
- Price: Price: for 1 $5.49(excluding tax)
- Found at: Fine Wine and Good Spirits, 2040 Market St. Philadelphia, PA 19143
- Alcohol content: 12% by volume Rating: ? Type of wine:
- Rating: 5 out of 10
- Type of wine: Sparkling rosé
- Container type: Can
- Container size: 375ML (half bottle of wine)
- Hails from: Healdsburg, California, USA
- Pairs well with: Summer, friends and fun.