Ever had a Bum Wine?

[shizaru]

I found this site (http://www.bumwine.com/) while trying to show a dutch friend what Mad Dog 20/20 was. I think its pretty funny and it brings back a few horror stories in my mind from the 80's when I was young and willing to drink such swill. Hell, in my college years I woke up in an alley after a night of drinking Thunderbird. I have no idea how I got there. My roommates say I just disappeared from a party we were at. Trust me i never touched that stuff again. None of my stories seem to compare to some of the ones in the sites guestbook, though.

One thing many of these wines have in common though is that they seem to make people go berserk. I vaguely remember a news story in Philadelphia years ago that they wanted to ban the sale of Mad Dog because of that. And when I first went to Fort Campbell my platoon sergeant told me to not drink cisco because its liquid crack. Has anyone had any crazy experiences with these cheap wines? I always hear stories of people going nuts and trashing their own house. Maybe I should have tried cisco after all.....

[ScareyFaerie]

Buckfast. Oh, jings. Not for nothing is it called a bottle of "Good morning, Your Honour"...or just "wifebeater"...

[Ponder Stibbons]

What? Oh, that sort of bum.

I was afraid that, upon opening this thread, I'd find a description of something from Santorum Vineyards.

Ewww. I didn't just write that, did I? Ewww.

[Cluricaun]

I'd bought my girlfriend a wine rack for Valentines one year, but she goes through wine too fast for storage to be much of a problem for us. I got tired of seeing the empty wine rack, so I decided to fill it with Bum Wine. I've got Richard's Wild Irish Rose, Night Train, Boones Farm, MD 20/20, and Thunderbird but I was rather dismayed to find out that Ripple isn't on the market anymore.

[August West]

Ugh, I had Cisco a few times while stationed in VA. On a logical level I realize that alcohol should have the same effect no matter what the delivery vehicle is, but Cisco was a very weird drunk.

Number one, it seemed like you were crazy drunk within minutes, and so you were an energetic drunk. I don't know, it was bizarre stufff. I never had the same reaction from MD 20/20.

On a side note, the first time I ever wondered if I might have a drinking problem was when someone handed me a bottle of some new flavor of Mad Dog and I said "Hey , that's not too bad!"

[CalMeacham]

For the other kind of bum wine, there's always


Hiney Wine:

http://www.hiney.com/

[Motorgirl]

We used to drink so much Wild Irish Rose when we were in high school. Yuck! We occasionally had Mad Dog & Thunderbird, but we usually stuck to Wild Irish Rose.

My husband apparently drank a lot of Boone's Farm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone's_Farm) in high school.

[Motorgirl]

Just noticed that Wild Irish Rose is made by the Canandaigua Wine Company - no wonder we drank so much of it in Ithaca.

[Fear Itself]

We use to have Red Rocket (a fortified wine last seen in the late '70's) parties in college. A buddy of mine bought several cases for pennies on the dollar from a liquor store that had been unable to sell it; it was probably several years old. Never have so few, barfed so much, for so long.

[lieu]

I'd bought my girlfriend a wine rack for Valentines one year...A term equally as disturbing as "bum wine".

[longhair75]

When Boone's Farm was introduced in my area, it only came in Apple, and was sold out of the refrigerated case. It was also under a dollar a bottle. Many lost weekends and horrific hangovers started with the phrase "Give me all the cold Boone's Farm ya got!"

[CalMeacham]

To my credit (I think), I've never had any of these. From the descriptions, I don't think I want to.

But I have t add another favorite at my high school (judging from the empties in the bathrooms):


Bali Hai



Do they still make that one?

[Cluricaun]

A term equally as disturbing as "bum wine".


Well it wasn't the only gift, and it is a rather elaborate wine rack. I also got her enough nice bottles to fill the sucker with.

[Carl Corey]

Yep. In college I had the "pleasure" of drinking Night Train on several occasions.

One night my house threw a hotel party, which means each room had a different drink. Two of my friends decided to serve wine and cheese.

The wine was Night Train.

The cheese was Nice n' Cheesy -- a Velveeta knock off.

People would see the sign and get all excited, and go into the room.

A few moments later they would come out looking like this: :eek:

Ah, memories.

[mnemosyne]

http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1041-5824/life_society/canada_wine/clip2

Baby Duck. Uggg. Only once, in high school, at a "drinks provided" party. I went back out and bought myself some beer. It is truly terrible stuff.

Then again, I was also "initiated" to drinking beer with a gift of a 40oz of Saint Ides...http://www.40ozmaltliquor.com/stideshg.html.... I have evil friends.

[silenus]

Gods, this is bringing back memories of college, and not good ones.

Boone's Farm - Done that.

Bali Hai - Done that

Ripple - Done that.

My stomach is churning just thinking about it.

[Rysdad]

Gods, this is bringing back memories of college, and not good ones.

Boone's Farm - Done that.

Bali Hai - Done that

Ripple - Done that.

My stomach is churning just thinking about it.

Anybody ever had Rhythm? 20 % alcohol, sweet and deadly.

Also, anybody remember Spanada? That was the wine during the late 60's.

Someone slipped me some "electric" Spanada once. Didn't tell me until I had had a couple of swigs. We were in a cave at the time. Weirdness ensued.

[TheLoadedDog]

We don't really have that sort of thing much in Australia - as in, a standard sized bottle of wine that's cheap and evil. They're around, but not common. IMpoverished students here tend to go for a 4 litre box of normal (but rough) table wine (around US$7.50 for a cheapie) - with Rohypnol sleeping tablets if they can acquire some, and the skid row types drink bottles of traditional fortifieds such as port or sherry.

As August West mentioned, you would think alcohol is alcohol, but it seems some of the street wisdom is right, and this isn't actually the case.

For some anecdotal evidence:
- Port, sherry etc: the few times I've had too much of this, I've simply gone into a coma. Never woken up in an alley, but I've put myself to bed, and I don't remember doing so. This is the weirdest of booze to me. It's like it's got something else in it. Bad news.
- Wine-inna-box: Doesn't get me particularly more drunk or differently drunk, but by the devil I pay for it in the morning.
- Drambuie: Yes, this is top shelf stuff, but when I worked in a pub, we ended up no longer selling it because the young men would always go troppo and fight or otherwise trash the place. Drambuie is whisky-based, and the same young men could drink whisky without dramas, so I am flummoxed on this one.
- Strong cider. Australian cider comes in at about beer strength (5% alc/vol) normally, but they put out a 10% a few years back. Many pubs stopped selling it because the young drinkers, again, went absolutely berko on it.

In my younger days when drinking to excess was the thing to do, I was famous amongst my mates as being a hard case for the amount of spirits I could put away. Give me a bottle of scotch, and I'll give you a high-functioning drunk. I explained to my mates that while that was so, on most occasions when we'd drink beer, I was the opposite. I'd have a few then want to sit down and doze off, and they'd be drinking beer all night. Beer, to me, is a heavy, heady, messy brainfunk. Spirits are the same to all my friends.

[bouv]

I drink the ol' MD 20/20 once a year, as a tradition at a yearly party-thing. In fact, that weekend is coming up a week from saturday. I hope my stomach is rady for the MD, cause it's a-comin' whether it wants it to or not!

[Uvula Donor]

Try some Boone's Farm Blue Hawaiian: Bright blue liquid, tastes like blue raspberry and coconut. I brought some to a dinner party one night when the host asked me to bring "the wine."

The proper glass to serve Boone's Farm in: Welch's Grape Jelly glasses.

[GingerOfTheNorth]

I'm not much of a drinker.

I like Boone's Farm.

I think the two statments above are related somehow.

[kaiwik]

Bali Hai

OMG...all the mothers in my neighborhood used to buy that by the gallon jug and sit around each other's kitchens in the afternoons getting bombed on that stuff! Then they would make terrariums out of the jugs! I was allowed to taste it, it tasted like Hawaiian Punch to me.

My brothers were always drinking Mad Dog and Ripple...vile tasting stuff, and I never went in for it. When I was a partying teenager we drank a lot of Boones Farm and Annie Green Spring, and I still like it. I also like wine coolers over beer. (Bartles and James Blue Hawaiian was my most recent new flavor, yum!) I never got too drunk on the cheap wine, but drinking beer always got me lip dancing/technicolor yawning drunk.

[Nightsong]

For the other kind of bum wine, there's always


Hiney Wine:
http://www.hiney.com/
[semi-hijack]
*gasps*
Hiney! I haven't seen them around in eons!

*proudly waves (can of) Hiney about* :D
[/semi-hijack]

As to the actual topic: the only one I've sipped has been the Boone's Farm 'wines'. I generally can't make myself drink more than a few swallows though, it just isn't a taste I care for.

Howeever, it's rather fun to serve some to someone who doesn't know what they've been served (beyond that it's some kind of alcoholic drink) and see what their reaction is. It tends to be :dubious:.
___
<< General System Error: Please sacrifice a goat and two chickens to continue. >>

[Cluricaun]

Not that it exactly falls into the Bum Wine category, but when it comes to some cheap ass hangover wines I do love me some Lambrusco. Light, sweet, bubbly and deadly. Carlos Rossi couldn't even come up with something as tasty and as poisonous as Lambrusco.

[drillrod]

Ugh, I had Cisco a few times while stationed in VA. On a logical level I realize that alcohol should have the same effect no matter what the delivery vehicle is, but Cisco was a very weird drunk.

Number one, it seemed like you were crazy drunk within minutes, and so you were an energetic drunk. I don't know, it was bizarre stufff. I never had the same reaction from MD 20/20.

I have to agree. I've drank Boone's Farm, MD and Wild Irish Rose, but the worst was a good, old-fashioned tear on Cisco, the crack of cheap wines.

Almost immediately I'd be drunk, obnoxious and hyperactive. Even more than when drunk on other things. Heck, the only blackouts I've ever experienced were the result of a bottle of Cisco.

Hmm, wonder if I can find some around here?

[FisherQueen]

They Might Be Giants have a wonderful song in honor of Thunderbird. It should be on every iPod on the planet.

"I remember now/ why they called it Thunderbird..."

[Scribble]

What? Oh, that sort of bum.

I was afraid that, upon opening this thread, I'd find a description of something from Santorum Vineyards.

And I thought I'd find a description of a drink the City of New York has made from the vagrants it takes off the streets.

[Scribble]

Or maybe wine that rummages through dumpsters and asks people for quarters.

[Hypno-Toad]

And I thought I'd find a description of a drink the City of New York has made from the vagrants it takes off the streets.

Soylent Grape is made from PEOPLE!

[Ludovic]

I myself was thinking of wine that had been around too long and gone "bad", like a "bum foot".

Speaking of which, I can't wait for Beaujolais Nouveau to come out: I had my first last Thanksgiving and won't go back to any other wine (even though some might consider it to be one step above "Bum Wine": as for myself, no oenophile, I plan on actually mixing it with about %25 Concord Wine :o (the best of the actual bum wines, so it can have a bum wine pedigree and a concord flavor to it)

[chowder]

Retsina, A Greek wine flavoured with wood resin.

Try it, I dare you

[Caffeine.addict]

I drank quite a few bottles of MD 20/20 and Boone's Farm in my day. My roommate freshman year in College used to make a drink whose recipes was the following. 1/3 of a drink cup of MD 20/20 any flavor but usually banana red, a 2 shots of cheap vodka, and top off with Mountain Dew. It was tasty at the time but left me with a hangover of almost epic proportions at a time when I usually didn't get hangovers. Boone's Farm was considered a girly drink but we would always drink it at 2:00 in the morning when we were out of everything else or when we were broke and wanted to get messed up for a few bucks.

I like retsina. I have a bottle of it in the fridge right now that I have been consuming. My wife thinks that it is disgusting, but I'm kind of fond of it.

[Ponder Stibbons]

And I thought I'd find a description of a drink the City of New York has made from the vagrants it takes off the streets.Ah, yes.

"Oh, bartender? I'll have a nice green wine from Soylent Vineyards ..."

[Ponder Stibbons]

Retsina, A Greek wine flavoured with wood resin.

Try it, I dare youI actually have. Tried it that is. One sip is my lifetime limit. :: shudder ::

[Ephemera]

Drambuie: Yes, this is top shelf stuff, but when I worked in a pub, we ended up no longer selling it because the young men would always go troppo and fight or otherwise trash the place. Drambuie is whisky-based, and the same young men could drink whisky without dramas, so I am flummoxed on this one.

Huh. Odd. I love drambuie and am a lightweight but don't get hit any worse by it than I do by liquors with harder reputations like rum, vodka, or tequila but, then, the drink that hit me the worst (if you ignore the night I wound up in the hospital following an entire fifth of rum, which I try to) was a bottle of chianti from about a year ago. It had me in bed the entire day afterward with my first and only hangover.

[Loach]

A couple of army buddies of mine would each buy a bottle of MD 20/20 to take to Austin (I was driving). When we got there they would break out the straws. Before we went into the clubs they would stick about three straws into the bottle and suck it down as fast as they could. That way they didn't have to buy an drinks in the club.

[Uvula Donor]

Retsina, A Greek wine flavoured with wood resin.

Try it, I dare you

I have. I really like it.

[bump]

Retsina, A Greek wine flavoured with wood resin.

Try it, I dare you


Hah... lightweight.

Let me tell you, after an afternoon at a friend's house eating spit-roasted lamb, dolmas, spanakopita, pasticcio(?), beer, baklava, and what seemed like a couple dozen shots of ouzo and metaxa with your friend's Greek dad, a glass of retsina seemed like a welcome respite. (not particularly an ouzo or metaxa fan!)

Honestly!

[Ghanima]

Bleach. Never cared for any of the bum wines. I have had Cisco in quantity though, when I was a desperate teenager. I think the reason you go so crazy on it is the high sugar content - it makes you into a very drunk adult crossed with a four year old on a sugar high.

[romansperson]

Retsina, A Greek wine flavoured with wood resin.

Try it, I dare you

It's flavored with pine resin, specifically. Good retsinas are all right. Bad ones are reminscent of Pine-Sol.

I nominate Canei White for the worst wine I've ever had. They should rename it Eau de Rotten Olives. I'd take Boone's Farm, Ripple and Catawba wines, as awful as they are, over Canei anytime.

[teela brown]

I'm remembering . . .

Green Hungarian
Mateus
Annie Something-field's
Cella

[tdn]

Bleach.
Tried it, hated it. It really burns going down. And then it's difficult to dial 911.

[teela brown]

Annie Something-field's


Annie Greensprings. It just came to me. Yakked it up the only time I drank it.

[Ghanima]

Tried it, hated it. It really burns going down. And then it's difficult to dial 911.
But it makes your teeth so clean and white!

[Count Blucher]

I'd bought my girlfriend a wine rack for Valentines one year

Thank you, thank you, Thank You, Cluricaun! Thank you for the fact that this wasn't a euphamism for 'implants'. :D

Bad wines:

Mateuse

(so-named, because it was in the wine vat that the vintner dropped a deuce...? Or the sound made when the turd landed in the wine? :eek: )

[Beware of Doug]

Last week in the Hy-Vee liquor dep't here in Ames, IA, was a big building-trades looking dude in dusty denims buying a case and a half of Boone's Farm. Pink flavor, I think.

My guess is he was in charge of drinks for the house party, bought nothing but 4 24-paks of Old Swillwaukee, and got chewed out by the old lady.

[Max Torque]

Not that it exactly falls into the Bum Wine category, but when it comes to some cheap ass hangover wines I do love me some Lambrusco. Light, sweet, bubbly and deadly. Carlos Rossi couldn't even come up with something as tasty and as poisonous as Lambrusco.
That'd be my wife's favorite, right there. I kid her about it all the time, since a gallon jug costs about six bucks.

But man, Lambrusco is Chateau Lafite Rothschild compared to "Two-Buck Chuck". Charles Shaw makes wine so ghastly that pissing in the bottle would be a redundancy. But I'm sure the alcohol content of Two-Buck Chuck is too low to make it a true "bum wine".

[susan]

Years ago when I was a psychiatric crisis intervention specialist for an urban college, we started having a huge increase in crisis calls (such as sexual assault) that involved Cisco, which was a new drink at the time. My coworker and I decided to try it to see what the draw was. Once was sufficient.

[Cisco]

my platoon sergeant told me to not drink cisco because its liquid crack.
Summer of 1992, I was in the 6th grade. One of the local news channels was running a big "Cisco is Liquid Crack" exposé. A few of my buddies and I saw it and did what any red-blooded American idiots kids would do - we had some older kids buy us a couple of bottles and took it camping with us that weekend.

We got completely annihilated and sat smoking cigarettes and acting the fool around the campfire all night. Not long after that, my family got our first computer with a modem and I started dialing up to bulletin boards. I thought it would be a neat handle for awhile, and although that was the first and last time I ever drank the stuff, I'm still Cisco to this day.

Huh. Weird that I've never told that story here before.

[chowder]

I have. I really like it.

Well I suppose there's always one :eek:

[Mister Rik]

Back when I was a drunk, I bought a bottle of Boone's because I didn't have enough cash for a 12-pack of beer. I drank the entire bottle in one sitting and never felt the slightest buzz.

After that my day-before-payday drink of choice was Mad Dog. But since I was normally a beer drinker, the MD tended to be a bit to strong for me. So I would buy a 2-liter bottle of 7-UP or Sprite along with the bottle of MD and mix the two. This also helped to make the bottle of MD last an entire evening, like a 12-pack of beer would (usually).

But man, that Mad Dog definitely had Novocain or something similar in it! If I was drinking it straight, pretty soon I'd be completely numb. Beer or whisky never did that to me.

Occasionaly I drank Wild Irish Rose, but MD was slightly more palatable. I don't think I ever tried Night Train or Thunderbird. Those bottles looked ... disreputable.