Hip Tastes Blog

The Bird is Back
filed under: Ramblings, Winning Wines

At a charity wine auction I attended recently someone jokingly put a bottle of infamous Thunderbird Wine on the $100 table, with its 99 cent price tag brazenly still stuck to the top of the bottle. I appreciated this person's humor so much that I purchased the bottle and determined to make a decent cocktail out of the stuff.

Enter much contemplation and some online research to draw inspiration. I discovered several things during the course of this research, and the end result was only a greater conviction to somehow transform the boozey wine so that, although it might never compete with cocktails made from some of the world's more venerable cocktail ingredients - top notch vodkas and winning vermouths come to mind - it might at least transform the nearly undrinkable nature of T-bird into something you can actually get down without choking.

But before I reveal my recipe (which is, by the way, surprisingly palatable), I'd like to share some tidbits I dug up online about the merry wine:

- It's produced and bottled by Thunderbird Ltd. in Modesto, CA, home to global wine conglomerate Gallo. Coincidence? Most definitely not. Although the bottle reveals nothing about its relationship to Gallo, the behemoth is most certainly the creator of the stuff. The bottle also says "Serve cold." If you must drink the stuff, this is an absolute must.
- It was launched after Prohibition with a radio campaign that became something of an anthem for the gutted boxcar set: "What's the word? / Thunderbird / How's it sold? / Good and cold / What's the jive? / Bird's alive / What's the price? / Thirty twice." Guess Thunderbird pricing hasn't kept up with inflation. Probably the only wine the value of which has actually decreased over the years.
- Venerable resource Bumwines.com, which profiles the top five "bum wines" on the market, insists that Thunderbird is the worst of the entire lot. They go on to say "As you drink on, the bird soars higher while you sink lower." They conclude by saying "we highly discourage driking this ghastly mixture of unknown chemicals unless you really are a bum."
- Wikipedia.org weighs in as well with a nod to the stuff's other target market--underage drinkers: "It is somewhat notorious for being a popular choice of alcohol for underage American drinkers, along with Boone's Farm." Reminding us that we've come a long way since high school.

THE RETURN OF THE BIRD
A trip to the local liquor store yielded two simple ingredients I used with a traditional bar cocktail shaker, plenty of ice and a strainer to create what I've dubbed "The Return of the Bird." Here's what's in it:

Good pour Thunderbird
Dash Rose's Grenadine syrup (available at most liquor stores) for color and sweetness
Squirt of lime juice
Float of Schweppes Ginger Ale soda

This concoction hardly rocked my world, but was such a significant improvement over the stuff alone that I feel it's a real accomplishment all the same. It looked and tasted rather like a cosmo, and drinking it out of nice martini stemware further diverted my attention from the actual contents of the stuff. And, as recommended on the bottle itself, I served it VERY COLD.
www.bumwines.com

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Posted by Courtney on November 20, 2005 06:15 PM