5 liters of Carlo Rossi Chardonnay in a box, today at a close out price for $3.50 per.
I just had to buy 3.
Funny though, on their website they say, " Carlo Rossi wine has always been served in a sturdy glass jug."
I got the box?
?
Did they misspell ‘mug’?
Why not a box and a jug for a blind, side by side taste test?
Why??? One maybe, if I was curious enough. But three? ![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}
Just to be clear, is it $3.50 per liter? Or $3.50 per FIVE liters?
$3.50 per FIVE liters!!!
Now this is a wine that will not improve with aeration.
There’s an internet meme traveling around about ‘how to eat pineapple pizza’ that this would go well…
You don’t have to taste the difference to know that the economics just don’t add up. If literal liters of an alcoholic beverage are being sold that cheap then something is also cheap with the quality of the product.
Not necessarily. You have to define “cheap” before you make that kind of statement because that is one of the most popular cooking wines in many restaurants. You don’t think people are doing reductions with high-end wine or making Bœuf Bourgignon with real Burgundy!
But here’s how they can do it:
Carlo Rossi red and white wines always start with the most delicious grapes from the Central Valley of California. The characteristics of those grapes evolve from year to year but Carlo Rossi wine has always been served in a sturdy glass jug.
Basically they get really cheap grapes and then add sugar, acid, tannin, etc. to build the wine to spec.
When I was a kid, there was always a jug of this sort of wine in the pantry. They had this strange chemically taste and did not change over the many weeks they were open. I have not gotten that taste in any wine since I became a wine geek a few decades ago, except once when visiting such a wine when it was the only wine option at a picnic and I was curious. Blech!
As a side note, the wine cooler fad hit when I was a teen. We’d blend in juice and/or soda with this crap and it would always be far superior to Bartles and James and their competitor’s products. It never ceases to amaze me how low quality so many commercial products are in such a seemingly unnecessary way.
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You can’t buy five liters of water for that little, can you?
Just to be clear, the regular price for the 5L box is $13.99. This was a closeout, hence the steep discount.
At that price you can do the world a favor. Buy it to pour it out.
Well, sometimes it is more that taste. One problem I have with very cheap wines is that I sometimes feel bad after drinking them. I don’t know if it is because something is added to the wines, or the wines are worse at a molecular level and affect the body differently. I seem to remember reading something about how good wines are better even under a microscope.
That’s what I was thinking, too.
Well then, it’s really expensive box wine.
When we were in Boulder over Labor Day last year, we were sitting in the bar of an Italian restaurant getting a glass of wine while waiting for a table.
The house cab and chardonnay were $4 a glass on special. Then I noticed the bartenderess pouring from a Carlo Rossi gallon jug into the house wine decanters.
I didn’t try it but others at sitting at the bar said it wasn’t too bad.
Never had a white, but certainly consumed the “burgandy” more than once back in the paying my way through college days (more used for cooking but it made it into the glass). Better than most of the less than a dollar per liter cadre back then
A buck a bottle was pretty upscale back then. Heaty Burgundy was $2.39/gal if I remember. But then I was making $500/mo and saving half of that.