College is all about finding the cheapest option that still gets the job done. This can be applied to many aspects of college living, but especially in our selection of alcohol. I love a good wine drunk (call me basic), but I simply don’t have the funds to reach past the $10 shelve. Although I do love a good glass of Barefoot Cabernet, every now and then, a girl has got to treat herself.
As I stared down the wine aisle of Walmart, scanning the $10 selections for deals and drooling at the $30+ selections, I thought to myself, THERE MUST BE ANOTHER WAY. I’ve seen some pretty crazy things on the internet, like people filtering their vodka through a Brita filter to make it taste more top shelf-worthy; if this is the case, there MUST be a way to life-hack your cheap wine too.
I settled for my usual $7 bottle, popped it open and starting Googling things like “ways to make cheap wine taste better.” ALAS, the first thing that popped up was this idea of putting your red wine into a blender.
Mixing it in 30-second intervals ages the wine an equivalent of five years through this process called “aeration.” There was a lot of science talk that went along with that but really the idea of making your cheap wine taste like the classy sh*t really got me hooked. So I grabbed a few bottles, called a few friends, and we put it to the test.
The Process
It’s as simple as this, blend your red wine in 30 second intervals (we chose a nice $3 Cabernet). Drink it in between to find your ideal “age;” for every 30 seconds, taste your wine magically age an equivalent of five years.
Not gonna lie, we were pretty skeptical of this; the blending process made the wine look like a nice strawberry smoothie, and when we removed the top, the liquid “smoked.” So, needless to say, we went in pretty nervous as to what we were about to taste.
Round 1
Ok, woah. The first 30 seconds of blending brought this wine from a $3 level to about a $10 level, still not AMAZING but a definite improvement. This got us so excited to keep blending so we wasted no time. In true wine-tasting fashion, we cleansed our pallets and poured up another batch.
Round 2
In addition to our $3 purchase, we decided to ball out and snag a $30 bottle (in the name of science, we had to have a control). I’m not kidding when I say we thoroughly enjoyed this 60-second blended wine far more than the $30 bottle. The aeration process makes the wine more smooth (less acidic) and we were all about it.
Round 3
Had to pull in other hand model because 90 seconds of blending makes this $3 wine taste WAY better than the $30 bottle (and deserves two thumbs up). This was really the sweet spot for blending, and you better believe we killed the rest of that bottle, with a side of sharp cheddar (it pairs best with Cabernet).
I was pretty skeptical about this trick—it seemed too good to be true. But to our surprise, it worked way better than we ever thought possible. To put it plain and simple, blending your wine is basically decanting it quicker. The wine reacts with the air to do what aging does in terms of taste.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll spend 90 seconds of my life blending my wine in order to save more than $20. Do you think I’ll get weird looks if I ask for my wine blended at the bar? Oh well, it’s worth a shot. Cheers!