buy wine with funny names
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images This post originally appeared on Strong Language, a sweary blog about swearing. Wine brands, especially in the upstart, insecure New World, used to strain to sound serious and Frenchy-fancy. You had your Domains, your Clos, your Chateaus (“Pure Sonoma”!). Even $5 plonk could seem classy if it had a ridge or a mountain or a gate in its name. As James Thurber’s wine snob put it in the famous 1944 New Yorker cartoon, we may have been drinking naive domestic Burgundy, but at least we could be amused by its presumption. If Thurber were cartooning today, he’d change that last word to presumptuousness. Because inappropriate language—from vulgarity to suggestiveness to scatology—is the hottest trend in wine branding. Here’s a survey of rude wine names, in alphabetical rude-word order. (And, since you asked, I know a bunch of rude beer brands, too. I’m sticking to wine this time.) This one’s actually French—from the Fitou appellation in Languedoc—although the spelling is British and, well, cheeky.
(Say it aloud, but quietly if you aren’t alone.) Bevlog, a blog from Lehrman Beverage Law, had no such scruples. Alas, Stu and his wife, Rae-Jean Beach, appear to have vanished from “Sonoma Beach” and wine aisles. Stu Pedasso and Rae-Jean Beach, R.I.P. To get the full flavor of the joke, pronounce “Sonoma” with emphasis on the first syllable. The Ball Buster, a vigorous red, is bottled by Tait Wines in Australia’s Barossa Valley. As seen in Costco, December 2011. From the Tait website, some unencumbered-by-the-editing-process copy: Fat Bastard—styled, for reasons unknown, as FAT bastard—is a French wine produced by a British-French partnership; the name came from the British partner, who “had used the expression Fat bastard often to describe things that were great but hearing it in a French accent made it so much funnier.” Fat Bastard is also, of course, a henchman of Dr. Evil who appeared in the second and third Austin Powers movies (1999 and 2002, respectively).
There’s also a Cranky Bastard blackberry wine made by Boutier Winery in Danielsville, Georgia. It’s a sweet wine, so the significance of the name is unclear. “Sweet Bastard” would have been cuter, IMO. (Time for a reminder that, yes, I know about bastard beer names: Dirty Bastard and Double Bastard [from Founders Brewing], Arrogant Bastard [from Stone Brewing]. Thanks for your interest, but we’re sticking to wine names here.) This is more than a label: It’s a category. In 2011, the New York Times’ William Grimes noted with something approaching alarm “a growing army of rude, budget-priced wines that have shoved their way into wine stores and supermarkets in the past few years.” The trend began in 2004 with an Australian Grenache called, simply, Bitch. Noting the appeal to young, relatively unsophisticated female drinkers, a passel of unrelated producers happily (or greedily) piled on, bringing us Sassy Bitch (Chile and California via Macon, Georgia), Royal Bitch (Chile via New York), Sweet Bitch (Chile via somewhere), Jealous Bitch (Australia), Tasty Bitch (provenance unknown), and Happy Bitch (Hudson Valley via social media).
All are nonvintage, most rely heavily on sweet grapes like Moscato, and none has a website that could win copywriting prizes. The Lehrman Beverage Law blog has this observation: You can swig any of these Bitch wines from a wineglass that proclaims “Don’t Be a Basic Bitch” or “Winey Bitch.” Old Fart is (or, more likely, was) a Southern Rhone vin de pays. The label alone probably accounted for whatever success it enjoyed. The perfect gift for the boss! Four Skins, from Nova Scotia’s Jost Vineyards (sorry, Jōst), tells a lovely story about four seasons, four directions, four elements, four corners, and “a carefully selected blend of four grapes.” But who are they kidding? Certainly not Jay Leno, who got positively sputtery when he talked about it on the Tonight Show in January 2013. (Hat tip: Gretchen McCulloch.) “No holds barred” is how If You See Kay describes its wine, an Italian import (by way of the Napa Valley) first released in fall 2014 “whose name when said aloud sounds the spelling of a four-letter expletive,” as The Drinks Business primly put it.
The If You See Kay website takes pains to depict a fictional “Kay” as “an embodiment of a lifestyle, a genre, a feeling in your gut … a force of nature, a wanderer.” Tell it to that old force of nature himself, James Joyce.* There’s a scientific justification for Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush, a Sauvignon Blanc from the New Zealand winery Coopers Creek: a sulfurous compound in white wine, p-mentha-8-thiol-3-one, is said by experts to smell like feline urine. (The gooseberry bush is a New Zealand reference; Americans call the fruit “kiwi.” I stand corrected: Kiwi fruit is Chinese gooseberry; Sauvignon Blanc is said to smell like regular gooseberries.) In the U.S. the rather pissy TTB made the winery change the name to Cat’s Phee, which is ridiculous. On the other hand, the “frog” in Frog’s Piss—a private bottling for what’s known affectionately as a “booze cruise”—may have something to do with the wine’s French origin. Then there’s Pisse-Dru—which translates to “thick piss” but is in fact an idiom indicating approval.
“It is clear,” writes Andrew Hennigan in his communications blog, “that the producer chose the this name deliberately, and is not among the ranks of the careless marketers who choose some unfortunate brand name simply out of carelessness.” Finally, Strong Language co-founder James Harbeck advised me via email of another French “piss” wine. From the Wikipedia entry: Naked Winery (“Let’s Get Naked!”) in Hood River, Oregon, has cornered this market. Their labels include Booty Call, Hookup, Foreplay, Bareback, Blazing Straddle, Penetration, Climax, and Oh! Not just ordinary shit, mind you—French shit! Le Vin de Merde (the tagline translates to “The worst hides the best”)—has a fly on its label and a high-quality grape blend inside the bottle; like Seigneurie d’Arse, it’s from Languedoc. (What’s up down there?) According to French News Online, the name is a direct reference to a disparaging comment made in 2002 by the chairman of a professional wine-tasting association, who described Beaujolais as “vin de merde.”