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• Happy hallowine

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My curiosity got the best of me when I walked into the grocery store last week and saw a bottle of wine with a bright pumpkin orange label reading “Hallowine.” It was too funny to pass up. So I shelled out the $10 for it, figuring it would make for some interesting conversation as Halloween approached. Plus, it said that it was a spiced apple wine; I figured it would be just like drinking some apple cider.

Cider it is not. The label recommends warming the wine (per usual, were it cider), and I dutifully obliged, serving up a temperately hot glass of it to my roommate and myself. We brought it up to our faces, preparing to take the first sip, ready for the warm and comforting experience of a hot mug of autumnal bliss, but what was that pungent smell affronting our noses?

Oh, that’s the gaseous byproduct of warming alcohol. Ignoring it, we pursued the glass, letting the sweet taste of apples and spices run over our tongues, but what was that acrid flavor assaulting our taste buds?

Oh, that’s the taste of fermented and/or rotted apples (it was hard to delineate) and an obscene amount of cloves and nutmeg. My roommate and I looked at each other, stayed quiet for a moment, sputtered a little bit and then started laughing. That’s what I deserve for getting something called Hallowine. Tasting more medicinal than anything else, the wine had a decent aftertaste, because only the flavor of the spices remained. But the aroma and the initial flavors were too much to handle. It essentially tasted like a white wine with unsweetened apple juice, cinnamon and some Vick’s added.

Neither my roommate nor I finished our glass of wine that night. But one thing we did agree on is that warming the wine only made the bad aspects of it come out all the more strongly — whoever wrote that on the label should be fired. Yet after chilling it, I’ve found it to be much more agreeable. But the lesson learned here is — don’t buy wines with cartoons of black cats and witches on the bottle, you’ll only be in for some trouble.