Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Sometime this summer, a 30-pound box arrived on my doorstep. It was bulky and cumbersome and, honestly, a little strange. Inside were three more boxes. Inside those, three plastic bladders; one containing water, the other two containing wine.
This Jesus cube, a collaboration between Essentia alkaline water and House Wine, is meant to walk a fine line. A little booze to get you tipsy and then some purified, ionized water to … well, maybe not bring you back, but at least make your following morning more pleasant.
It came to me with the intent of a summer sensation; a limited-edition offering for pool gatherings and beach days. But since I’ve got a backlog of beverages to drink here (brag), it lingered a bit longer. And since Patrick Mahomes is an official Essentia spokesperson — no word on how he feels about boxed wine, though I’d wager he’s in favor, partically after looking at his wideouts — I turned my attention to a similar social space in need of hydration. The tailgate.
OK, that’s a weird tailgate combo, but I don’t judge. Drink what makes you happy, and if a little rosé is gonna make pre-game better for some folks, hell, have at it. Personally my review of the wine itself is going to be muted because, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s pretty much the one thing I don’t drink. But I’ll do it for the sake of the review — and to figure out if Essentia and House Wine created a viable product or merely a 30 pound curiousity.
House Wine rosé: B
That’s where I landed with House Wine’s rosé. It tastes like wine. Easy to drink and not bad by any stretch. So rather than leave it at that, I enlisted a lady friend who has plucked House Wine’s $16 boxes from the shelves of our local Woodman’s multiple times. Here’s what she had to say.
“It doesn’t taste right. It doesn’t taste the same to me. Almost like it’s about to turn.”
OK, can’t help y’all there. It tastes fine to me, but fortunately we’ve got reviews from other boxes this summer. Here’s what she had to say about the typical rosé offering.
“It’s light. For summer it’s a lighter wine but it probably goes down too easy. So the water is nice to make sure you’re not getting into too much trouble.”
So there you have it. It’s an easy drinking box wine you can pick up for something like $5 per bottle. Which sounds like a bargain to me.
Essentia Water: Very water-y. Perhaps the most water-y?
It pours, smells and tastes like … water. Granted, a high quality purified water, but it’s still just water. There’s no acidic tang to it, obviously, and it tastes a little … heavy? Dense? I mean, it’s good tasting water, but it’s also water.
There’s not a lot you can do with it. I like it fine. I feel hydrated. It’s water.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?
This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Essentia water or House Wine’s rosé over a cold can of Hamm’s?
The wine is a no, but that’s only because I don’t really drink wine. Everything else points to it being a solid sipper at a low price, which I can appreciate the hell out of.
Essentia Water, to its credit, does taste like pure, clean water and I felt pretty good after a couple glasses on a hot September day. That’s gonna come in extremely handy in between cans of Hamm’s. All in all, this is a solid, albeit weird, box combo.
