Four Gross Things You Can Use to Make (Gross) Wine
Wine tends to be gatekept by the upper classes — drinking it, making up descriptions of it, but most all, making it. That doesn’t mean you can’t approach it from the perspective of a complete garbage mouth, though, and we’re not just talking about picking up a bottle of Boone’s Farm. Anarchist vintners can, and do, make wine from all manner of filth, even — especially — when they definitely shouldn’t.
Mountain Dew
You would think wine would require at least one plant, but as Charles Biolo pointed out on TikTok, it’s really just sugar and yeast. Mountain Dew has one of those things in spades, so Biolo decided to try adding honey, yeast and baking soda to counteract the additives and raise the pH and see what happened. After leaving the vat sitting around for about the same amount of time a case gets stored beneath a gamer’s bed — a month or two — Biolo reported that it tasted like “a smooth citrus mead with maybe a slight chemical aftertaste.” Yum.
Peeps
Every Easter since 2022, people keep rediscovering a Tumblr post by a user with the appropriately unhinged name battlecrazed-axe-mage that documents the process for making wine out of Peeps. The finished product looks like a standard rose and, according to them, tastes “like a very mild, sweet white wine, with a faint but unmistakable aftertaste of marshmallow.” (Biolo tried this, too, but their batch was both a lot more fussy and boring.) The best part is the eyes, which seem to always rise to the top like tiny hunting trophies.
Candy Corn
Peeps aren’t the only controversial seasonal candy you can get drunk on, either. In 2021, a blogger by the name Toglefritz posted a recipe for candy corn wine. After reading about the previous two recipes, you’re basically an expert in winemaking, so you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of the process by now, but this one is noteworthy for requiring three whole bags of candy corn, ensuring your place as the top buyer of candy corn in your state that day. The resulting beverage looks like orange Fanta and tastes like, well, Toglefritz recommends using it as a mixer.
Blood
It’s by far the grossest item on this list — well, arguably grosser than candy corn — but blood, usually from an ox, was actually used by fancy-pants winemakers for far longer than anyone should be comfortable with. In a process called fining, the blood was used to extract impurities from the wine prior to bottling, but the practice was banned in the EU and the U.S. in 1997 due to concerns about mad cow disease and somehow not, you know, general concerns. The nature of the fining process meant that very little, if any, of the blood actually remained in the wine, but are those really the qualifiers you want when it comes to potentially going Dracula on some bovines?
