At a charity wine auction I attended recently, someone jokingly put a bottle of infamous Thunderbird Wine on the $100 table, with its 99 cent price tag brazenly still stuck to the top of the bottle. I appreciated this person’s humor so much that I purchased the bottle and determined to make a decent cocktail out of the stuff.
Enter much contemplation and some online research to draw inspiration. I discovered several things during the course of this research, and the end result was only a greater conviction to somehow transform the boozey wine so that, although it might never compete with cocktails made from some of the world’s more venerable cocktail ingredients—top notch vodkas and winning vermouths come to mind—it might at least transform the nearly undrinkable nature of T-bird into something you can actually get down without choking.
But before I reveal my recipe (which is, by the way, surprisingly palatable), I’d like to share some tidbits I dug up online about the merry wine:
- It’s produced and bottled by Thunderbird Ltd. in Modesto, CA, home to global wine conglomerate Gallo. Coincidence? Most definitely not. Although the bottle reveals nothing about its relationship to Gallo, the behemoth is most certainly the creator of the stuff. The bottle also says, “serve cold.” If you must drink the stuff, this is an absolute must.
- It was launched after Prohibition with a radio campaign that became something of an anthem for the gutted boxcar set: “What’s the word? / Thunderbird / How’s it sold? / Good and cold / What’s the jive? / Bird’s alive / What’s the price? / Thirty twice.” Guess Thunderbird pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. Probably the only wine the value of which has actually decreasedover the years.
- Venerable resource Bumwines, which profiles the top five “bum wines” on the market, insists that Thunderbird is the worst of the entire lot. They go on to say “As you drink on, the bird soars higher while you sink lower.” They conclude by saying “we highly discourage drinking this ghastly mixture of unknown chemicals unless you really are a bum.”
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