Modern Living: And Now, Pop Wines

Wine lovers have long cultivated their own peculiar vocabulary. A vintage can be “flinty,” “robust” or even “amusingly presumptuous.” Never, however, has a wine been discussed in terms of its lemon, lime or coconut flavor. Never, that is, until now. Flavored “pop” wines have arrived and are showing up on liquor-store shelves in ever-increasing numbers and varieties.

The names of the new favorites are in themselves enough to give any true wine lover the pip: Zapple and Boone’s Farm (both apple wines), Bali Hai and Key Largo (orange, papaya and other fruit extracts), Spañada (grape), three different blends that are jointly named I Love You (“I” tastes like lemon-lime, “Love” is fruity and “You” has a cola flavor), Ripple (grape wine and tropical fruits) and Annie Greensprings (a grape rosé). The biggest sellers seem to be Boone’s Farm, Bali Hai, Spañada and Ripple: exact figures are being withheld by the manufacturers, who profess to be uninterested in publicity.

Beyond the fact that they do not taste like real wine, pop wines have much in common: they are cheap at about $1 a bottle, and their alcohol content is a minimal 11% or so. Another advantage: they add a pleasant extra dimension to the effects of pot.

Alcoholic Pop. Pot smokers alone cannot account for the phenomenal rise in pop-wine sales, which are now roughly estimated at $75 million a year. Despite the bonanza, there are still purists among the vintners. “I don’t approve of these wines,” says Sig Langstadter, wine buyer for Sandburg Super Mart in Chicago. “I don’t think they should be considered wines. They’re just soft drinks with alcohol.”

Pop-wine aficionados have an answer for such snobbery: flavored wines have been around for a long time. Spaniards favor sangria, made of red wine and fruit juices; French and Italian sweet vermouths are simply flavored wines; Greeks add resin to wine to produce retsina. Indeed, products like Thunderbird (a citrus-flavored wine that is 18% alcohol) have been on U.S. shelves for more than a decade. These cheap, more potent brands should continue to sell, mostly to the Skid Row set, despite the pop-wine invasion. What would a serious wino want, after all, with a low-alcohol tipple called Annie Greensprings?