UK Supermarket Bum Wines, ASDA vs Sainsbury’s
Ruari O’Toole
Over here in the United Kingdom the bum wine landscape is
different to the States. Here bum wines of legend like Thunderbird and Wild
Irish Rose are rare and getting rarer, requiring pretty intense detective work
to track down.
Our supermarket chains keep the outdoor-drinker flag flying,
however, with each one boasting a range of fortified wines and other
liver-ruiners to mess up your weekend and ruin your shirt, and here’s two of them!
ASDA is a member of the Wal-Mart family, and boasts such
quality drinks as Scotsmac (a weird whiskey/wine mix that is scarily drinkable)
and Mansion House, a truly disgusting fortified wine that leaves the tastebuds
wanting to kill themselves. Having suffered/enjoyed both of these recently I
plumped for Club Royal Original Pale Cream, a 15% abv fortified wine that’s at
the higher end of their bum-booze spectrum in terms of price, but just as rough
in the quality stakes as the rest of their bum wines.
Club Royal smells like you could run a motorboat on it. It’s
got the sickly, sugary Thunderbird scent down perfectly, the “say goodbye to
your teeth and job” smell that marks a particulary hobo-y drink.
In the first taste it’s clear that the slightly marked up
price (just under £5.00) is mainly for the label, which is really classy if you
only look at it sideways for like five seconds. Club Royal is a bum wine in the
spirit of Thunderbird, it tastes like being shot in the face with a gun made of
sugar and instantly makes the throat and chest burn like you’ve drank petrol.
The aftertaste burns a little but quickly dies down, making for fast drinking
and faster barfing at the end of the night. Club Royal is sickly, sugary and
chuggable, although you may hate yourself for it in the morning.
From ASDA we go up-market to Sainsbury’s, a supermarket
chain that thinks a lot of itself but still can’t get away from selling Tudor
Rose, a red (more dirty brown, if we’re honest) British wine that weighs in at
a relatively weak 13% abv. It doesn’t have the same
ten-bags-of-sugar-to-the-face nasal wallop as Club Royal, instead its scent is
more “roasted sack of chemicals”.
The taste is saccharine, bitter and sour, more like apple
juice that’s been left to go really, really, really bad in direct sunlight for a year than the “imported grape
juice” used in the production of Tudor Rose. And yeah, you read that right. Not
even imported grapes. Just their juice. Tudor Rose is bad. Not even the
entertaining badness you get from a film with “Megashark” in the title. It’s
just bad.
Tudor Rose feels like it starts to collapse back into its
component parts even as it hits the tongue. It ends up feeling like a grainy
landslide of burned and chopped shoeleather, sluiced down with over-the-counter
cough medicine.
If we make this a contest, and why the hell not, then Club
Royal is the clear winner. After a few glasses of Club Royal it’s easy to feel
like some kind of alcoholic superhero, ready to throw empty bottles at
injustice. After a few bottles of Tudor Rose it’s easy to feel like just giving
up on life. There’s an instant buzz on drinking Club Royal, and an instant
“meh” on drinking Tudor Rose.
Give it up, ladies and gentlemen, for ASDA’s bum wines. And
in your face, Sainsbury’s. Not so fancy any more.