Château de Ménai

A friend of mine has asked me to review the wine he made in his dad's garage in Menai, NSW. Apart from watching an instructional Youtube video, he has no winemaking experience whatsoever. My sample arrived in the mail today, so here goes...

Variety: 

- Crimson Seedless (hand-harvested from the discount bin at Menai IGA Supermarket)

Technical Information: 

- Crushed by hand
- Inoculated with baker's yeast
- "Shitloads" of sodium metabisulphite added
- Sugar added
- Lime leaves added (yes, lime leaves)
- No fining or filtration
- Bottled in James Squire stubbies

Tasting Note:

The wine's colour resembles Charlie Sheen's urine on a Monday morning, or perhaps the discharge from a leaky anus on Embarrassing Bodies. Not only is the colour somewhat off-putting, but the haze makes me think that Stifler was the assistant winemaker.

The aroma? A heady mix of sulphur dioxide and the pungent scalp cheese found under Whoopi Goldberg's dreadlocks... probably. It's taken me approximately three hours and five rum and Cokes to summon the courage to taste this formidable fluid. The only way I could be more afraid of a liquid, was if I was diving after Greg Louganis at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

It tastes very much like a refreshing glass of Ribena, which is great, because the extreme SO₂ level is causing severe respiratory irritation, swelling around my eyes and hive-like rashes to break out on my face. The blackcurrant flavour takes me back to my childhood, which helps ease the thought of my impending death by pulmonary edema.

Thankfully I survived this experience, and as they say, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". I wonder if that saying also applies to my friend, after I bludgeon him to within an inch of his life with an empty James Squire stubbie for making me drink this offensive vin ordinaire.