2017 La Bulle-Moose de Cigare Fizzy Pink, Bonny Doon
I was looking through the discount bins at my local New Hampshire state liquor store when a stack of black soda cans with a big red moose on them caught my eye. When I saw the words "2017 Fizzy Pink of the Earth" on the label I knew it had to be an offbeat wine from Bonny Doon. Which, of course, it was. Randall Grahm's idea is to take the red/white/rose wines from the Cigare Volant line, carbonate them, and sell them in 375ml pop-top cans. The name is a sort of double French/English multilingual pun on bubbly wine: bulle (French for "bubble") and moose/mousse. The "de Cigare" bit refers to the Cigare Volant base wines. As usual with Bonny Doon wines, there's a mildly entertaining essay on the back label.
I'm very fond of the 2017 Vin Gris de Cigare--it's been my go-to rose since it was released--so I decided to buy one of these and try it out. I like rose champagne. I wasn't expecting methode champenoise, of course, but perhaps something along the lines of bulk-processed domestic sparklers.
When I poured the wine into a champagne flute, there was a rush of soda pop-type fizzy bubbles for about five seconds. No fizz after that. The aroma was very faint. In the mouth, there was the sort of spritz that you sometimes find in young German wines and that's almost universally considered a fault everywhere else. The wine tastes like 2017 Vin Gris de Cigare cut with club soda. Flavors slide off the palate almost immediately, and the finish is metallic and mercifully short. This wine is a big disappointment, and the first mediocre wine I've had from Bonny Doon. A Shemp double Besser on the Three Stooges wine scale.
I dug out last week's bottle of 2017 Vin Gris de Cigare to do a label comparison. The varietal blend is the same for both wines, but the alcohol content is lower on the Bulle-Moose (13% vs. 13.5% for Vin Gris de Cigare). So I suspect that cutting it with club soda is exactly what they did.
One other thing I noticed is that the government-required appellation and producer's address information reads, "2017 Central Coast Carbonated Pink Wine. Canned by Bonny Doon Vineyards, Modesto California, USA, Earth." I found that odd because both the Vin Gris de Cigare label and the Bonny Doon website give a Santa Cruz address. The only winery I know of in Modesto is Gall--erm, I mean, The Winery Who Must Not Be Named, the Vinous Voldemort. Do they own the Bonny Doon name now, or is it just that Bonny Doon is using their canning facilities and is then required by law to state the Modesto address?
Bottom line is that I recommend the advice from Monty Python's "Australian Table Wines" sketch: "This is not a wine for drinking--this is a wine for laying down and avoiding."
-Paul W.