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Doom the Funky Alcoholic Wine Review: Charles Shaw Shiraz
by Doom
More fucking wine. That's what it always is, wine on the weekend, wine on the weekday, wine wine wine wine wine wine wine. Never lager, it's always wine. Why? I don't know. I have a corkscrew, I might as well get use out of it. The screw off tops suck anyhow. Shiraz is yet another derivation of Charles Shaw aka Three Buck Chuck I've chosen to drink and, um, review. Charles Shaw is a good wine to get drunk on because it's cheap and not altogether terrible, though the taste quality differs from flavor to flavor. The whites are generally tolerable while the reds cannot make that same claim. But I often buy the red varieties anyway because I want to challenge myself. Yeah, quaffing Chardonnay is easy. A little too easy. I want to test my endurance against undrinkable sewer contents once in a while. Wouldn't you?
So there I am, listening to some Kittie live tracks (fuck off, faggots, they're hardcore and they're hot, good enough for me), drinking this red wine made by Charles Shaw. Not a night out of the ordinary. The Shiraz tastes worse than the Cab but better than the Merlot, which is the lowest of the low when it concerns Chuck Shaw. If you're in the mood for a red wine, Shiraz is a decent choice if you're the type of drinker I am, which is to say you go to meeting rooms in your college and drink shit down as fast as possible so you can blow off your entire day of classes and still somehow manage to get a 3.8 GPA. If you're not, you may be of a weaker disposition and a higher taste, in which case I do not recommend this Shiraz because it tastes like gutter water mixed with some homeless people semen to cap off an overall mediocre concoction of shitty grapes picked by decaying Mexican migrant worker corpses.
But it's never really the taste that matters if you're under the legal age to buy alcohol and your main desire lies in getting drunk and not in enjoying wine or whatever other booze you prefer like a pretentious fucking twat who has books on wine. I myself have very few criterions when it comes to taste and quality of the wine I routinely guzzle in order to forget about my troubles or more importantly my disastrous, darkened, soot covered carcass of a love life. This wine tastes like dying but I don't care much because it gets the job done, dammit, and I'm not some pussy lieutenant who needs drinks to be by the book. Wine bottles don't even have fucking badges so why bother with the procedural element. That is the question you cannot answer.
But really, Shiraz does suck when it comes down to it and you judge it against actual wine made by real people and not a succession of migrant workers America does not even deign to give respect towards (or acknowledge the existence of). It tastes like the insides of the Devil. And yes, I do know what that tastes like since I met Morrarr, the ice god who ruled over Reverse-Hell. He did in fact live in a realm in which the Devil's insides decorated the planet. I had the misfortune of drinking all of it in a quick succession of minutes because I'm a fucking fool who drinks things fast in order to feel the drunken octopus sensation sooner rather than later. What a fool I am! The Foolkiller will surely kill my cracker ass. There's no real traces of fruit or fruit flavoring. Determining whether there's strawberry or cinnamon or zest in there will force you to spend too much time analyzing, which in turn requires you to think about the taste. You don't want to think more than you absolutely have to about the taste.
I wonder which wing of Charles Shaw (the mafia wine family) produces the Shiraz bottles, because I don't for a minute to believe the same guy in charge of the Chardonnay is in charge of the Shiraz. Unless he's, you know, the Antichrist, no way would he think "okay, this Chardonnay tastes wine, now let me taste test the rat poison". Again, I don't think he's the Antichrist, so obviously Billy Carter or Goofus (of Goofus and Gallant) is in charge of quality control for the Shiraz. While I said before that it's drinkable, it's not good and not anything even a cheap shitty winemaker who employs Mexican illegals would knowingly produce. There must be something afoot, be it evil or incompetent. I suggest evil. While I first threw out the evil explanation, under more consideration it begins to make more sense. Charles Shaw could make good Shiraz or they could make shitty Shiraz and sales would be about the same. What is the incentive for making the good over the shite? In case you cannot grasp rhetorical question or obvious questions (this is both), the answer is 'none'. And really, most people wouldn't know the difference anyway. Shiraz inherently tastes worse than a lot of other kinds of wines.
In addition to the Shiraz, I drank a bottle of Tisdale death liquor, aka Tisdale Chardonnay. This was maybe a bad idea at the beginning, but it became a great idea once I drank all of it, for in my period of increased alcoholic activity my tolerance has grown to the point where 2 1/2 bottles worth will not cause me to feel sick and/or vomit. (I also went to a bar later in the night and knocked back a couple tiny bottles of some shitty, chilled Chilean white wine. Ah, bars - the place to be if you want to see the charred shells of what were once possibly promising human beings. An ego booster all around!) This made the drunkenness all the more fun, having so much of it in the body that one begins to believe they might explode into a Ted Kennedy-esque episode of driving a woman off into a lake. Good fuckin' times.
The hangover was rather bad. Because I drank 2 bottles and made no effort to remedy it through some sort of pill or device or person. As such, I woke up blind for about an hour and then it got gradually better. Gradually being the keyword in the sentence. It took me over 4-5 hours to regain the cognizance associated with my normal "sober" level. This really put a crimp in my day. I mean, I couldn't do my usual duties of writing and drinking heavily! Oh, the horror. I'm not prone to hangovers, but when they do hit, holy fuck does it ever fucking kill me. Imagine a headache that is in your entire body. Then you have an idea of 1/10th of the pain a bad hangover inflicts. Light hangovers are fine as long as you drink soon after waking up. But bad ones...only if you had a placenta made of booze that you kept in your desk drawer still for emergency situations would you be able to put a dent into it. So yeah, bad hangover. But I cannot empirically say Shiraz creates a bad hangover since there were outside factors affecting the overall experience.
I think a comparison between Charles Shaw Shiraz and any Wu-Tang album past the first one is the best relation I can make within the parameters of this wine and rap albums. You keep buying Wu-Tang, even though you know you're going to be disappointed, just in the hope of the next one being in any way close to 36 Chambers. Like subsequent Wu-Tang, Shiraz isn't really bad...it's just not good. But one thing Shiraz has over Wu: there's no U-God in the bottle I drank. Or if there was, I drank him, so he's now dead. Fuck yeah, I possibly killed U-God! Woo! Woo!
There you have it: woo.
THEY SHOULD'VE WAITED FOR ODB TO RESOLVE HIS LEGAL PROBLEMS, GODDAMNIT