August 2009

Mega Purple: The Secret Ingredient in Your Vino

If you’re a big wine aficionado, you probably already know about Mega Purple. But when I stumbled upon it over the weekend, I was pretty surprised.

When you read about wine, you hear all kinds of positive things—how beneficial a glass a day can be for your health, how delicious it is, how amazingly intricate the process of making wine is, how natural wine itself is.

It turns out that wine isn’t always 100% natural… or, at least, not in the way many of us would think. In a world full of food additives from everything to growth hormones to preservatives to colors, it’s really not that surprising.

Mega Purple, a food additive made by grapes, is used to add color to many “cheaper” wines, but it has also been known to alter the taste of wine, as well as the texture. It’s used by most wines below $20 in the United States in order to—get this—standardize wine.

Drink-of-the-Month

If you’re looking to expand your drinking experience and try out some new brands, flavors and combinations, why not make a goal of trying a new drink each month? You can expand your taste buds, find out what you like (and what you don’t) all without overdoing it.

First, you can create a list of all the drinks that you would like to try. You could look them up by flavor; for example, if you love cranberry juice, you may want to have a Cosmopolitan, a Cape Cod, or a Ruby Relaxer. If you’re more into hard liquor, you might want to look up all the drinks you can find that feature whiskey, such as a Rob Roy, an Irish Coffee, or an Italian Stallion. You can search for different drinks by using your base as the search term, or visiting a site such as The Webtender.