2 Birds Investigates: Bum Wine!

First things first: T.G.I. Hagman!

As of 4:48am, Larry Hagman is...alive!

Now, I have a question for you: Why? Why is it physically impossible for me and Chris to do an investigation that goes smoothly? Like, from start to finish; everything just goes right. We have a plan, we execute the plan, and then it's over. Period. No shenanigans. No embarrassing physical pain. Just a successful investigation. But no, apparently this isn't an option, as evidenced (yet again) this past weekend when Chris and I investigated "bum wine."

First and foremost, I had no god given idea what bum wine was:

Tulane Chris: "It's malt grape wine that's popular among homeless because it's so potent and cheap."

Meg: "Oh. So like a 40?"

TC: "No, that's a 40."

M: "So like that malt beer that comes in the big cans?"

TC: "No, that's malt beer."

Meg: "Wait...so it's wine?"

TC: "Why don't you on hop the Wikipedia, Princess."

So then I spent an embarrassing amount of time researching bum wine (big ups to bumwine.com!), which reminds me of the time Ex Co-Blogger Chris tried to get me to do poppers and we got into a huge fight because I did a project in 10th grade on Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome and that's how people die, and he said he was pre-med in college so I should just believe him that poppers are harmless and I was like, "UH, BULLCORN," so we spent 20 minutes fighting over the poppers Wikipedia entry until we realized we were fucking losers and watched Hocus Pocus instead. True story.

Once I actually grasped the concept of bum wine, we set out to find some. This task proved significantly harder than we originally anticipated. Considering I couldn't find a liquor store in my neighborhood that sold Andre last New Year's Eve, I assumed trying to find bum wine around these parts would be fruitless, so we headed east towards someplace slightly more..."spicy"—Columbia Heights.

Ah, that's more like it.

Well, actually, first we went to Target where I impulse bought a floor lamp because it was on sale and I've been living off candlelight and Hat ever since my old one died, oh, almost two years ago. As exciting as this purchase was (and continues to be!), buying it before we found bum wine turned out to be a horrible, horrible decision on my part. Why? Because we had to go to seven liquor stores before we found one that carried bum wine and that lamp was fucking heavy. I can imagine we were quite a sight: two nerdy white kids hoofin' it up and down 14th street, one hauling a giant lamp on her back, panting ever-so-slightly and muttering a unique array of swears under her breath, going into any and every liquor store all, "Y'ALL GOT MAD DOG? YES? NO? NO? CHRIST!"

At one point we just flat-out gave up and decided to buy scratch-offs in hopes that one of us would win the jackpot and doing the investigation would be a non-issue. Gold Fever, baby!

Shockingly, that plan didn't quite pan out, so it was back to bum wine hunting. Thankfully we found a liquor store that carried bum wine shortly thereafter, so we loaded it into my giant lamp bag, flicked a 10 under the partition, put our monocles on and spun our canes all the way back to my neighborhood to trash our livers in the name of a good investigation, which we proudly present to you now.

2 Birds Investigates: Bum Wine

[Chris asked me to insert an animated gif here because he's quote, "trying to get into animated gifs these days." "O...K. Did you have a particular gif in mind?" "Meh. Dancing banana, I guess."

...Christ.]

How to host a bum wine party:

Step 1: Google "how to host a wine party". Apparently the three key things to notice are color, bouquet (what we bums call smell) and taste. You'll have to wait for the next morning to rate the intensity of the hangover.

Step 2: Take out two fresh glasses and a salad plate of nine peanut M&M's to "cleanse the palette" between "wines".

Step 3: Designate a legal heir.

Step 4: Decide the tasting order of your wines. Generally you want to go from light to dark with a rosé in the middle. However, if all of your wines are the same industrial pink, order them so that you'll be a little drunk by the time you get to the ones you really dread.

Step 5: Remember to set out an extra glass to pour the wine you inevitably can't finish into. Chris and I didn't know the technical term for this, so we just lovingly referred to it as "The Bukkaki Cup".

Step 6: Take half a Xanax, go to your safe space, and begin.

WINE 1: Arbor Mist Peach Chardonnay

For the reckless Mormon divorcée in you!

Color: I appreciate that in our notes, my observation was, "It looks like carbonated urnine," whereas Chris' was, "Like the bright clear yellow of a jaundiced man's eyes." You know it's a good writing partnership when one partner's writing fixates on body fluids and the other's sounds like a haiku.

Bouquet: Like if a peach had little Chardonnay barfs down the front of its blouse.

Taste: Image you're a baby bird and mama bird comes to regurgitate breakfast for you, but instead she regurgitates a sorority initiation party and a bag of CVS Peach-Os and then pecks you to death.

WINE 2: Manishevitz Cream White Concord

The Eleventh Plague

Color: It looks like urine. We're not even trying to be funny; it just genuinley looks like human urine. Like you could take it to the doctor, hand it to a nurse and the test would show: You are comprised of 100% Diabetes, but this is definetley urine.

Bouquet: Ooof. Sniffing this got me in a way. It smells exactly like a Bath & Body Works body splash I wore in middle school. It was the crucial third leg of the Meg McBlogger middle school fashion triangle:

Taste: 6,000 years of unbroken tradition, but their wine still tastes like simple syrup and Old Spice.

WINE 3: Mad Dog Banana Red

"Take me down to the Pradise City where the bananas are red and the girls are throwing up into the gutter"

Color:

Red is nature's way of saying, "DANGER!"

Smell: Meg: "This smells like nail polish remover and banana Laffy Taffy."

Chris: "Frankly, that may be what it is."

Taste: My favorite conversation of the evening occrued directly after tasting this:

Chris: "DO YOU KNOW THAT NURSERY RHME, 'QUEEN QUEEN CAROLINE, WASHED HER HAIR IN TURPENTINE?!?!'"

Meg: "No..."

Chris: [100% defeated] "Oh. Well. Nevermind."

This, in my opinion, was the worst out of them all. It just tasted like straight-up chemicals. Like a ration of Soviet People's Holiday Drink that got left behind in a Ukranian missle silo. So much so, we successfully used it clean Thai food drippings off my coffee table and grime off my bathroom sink:

It left a streak-free shine—presumably on our stomachs as well.

WINE 4: Wild Irish Rose Red

Chris told you Ireland was the Third World

Color: It was the closest out of them all to being a real food color. It was less DANGER! and more PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

Bouquet: Sweet like a first kiss—assuming your first kiss was with a truck stop hooker low on cash, but high on dreams and Newport Lights.

Taste: At first it just tastes incredibly sweet and you're like, "Well this isn't that bad." And then it tastes exactly like a licking a shag carpet.

WINE 5: Four Loko Watermelon

Banned at the University of Rhode Island!

[Note: Chris and I had no idea what we were getting oursrelves into with this one. We were at our 780th liquor store of the evening and needed one more wine or wine product to round out the tasting. In desperation, we went to the cooler to get a canned beverage and chose Four Loko simply because it was at eye level. The next morning, we got an email from a reader asking us if we'd heard of this new Four Loko craze and since then it seems to have exploded onto the National stage like a pink, caffeinated Christine O'Donnell. We really appreciate being 24 hours ahead of this trend because we were the kids growing up who were 24 months late on things like pogs, Airwalks and Mayim Bialik.

Here's what we were getting into:

]

Color: I was originally offended when Chris said this, but the best way to describe it really is as, "Hello Kitty's pussy."

Bouquet: It smells like if Jolly Ranchers had night sweats.

Taste: Chris and I were like the opening credits to Patty Duke when tasting this one: they walk alike; they talk alike; at times they even recoil alike—what a crazy pair! The taste wasn't that bad, but then all of a sudden there's a sleeper taste; like a fizzy, sour burn in the back of your throat that hit us at exactly the same time. You will never know how beatiful that moment was. It was like:

WINE 6: The Bukkuke Cup

"I'm not drunk! I'll prove it—I'll drink from the Bukkake Cup!"

Color: The Devil is a woman. And she's raggin'.

Bouquet: If you take a deep breath and look in the mirror, you'll see how you're going to die.

Taste: You know what it tasted like? Exactly what it was.

WINE 7: Garnier Full Control Hairspray: All Day Flexible Hold, and a paper bag

7,500 brain damaged teenagers can't be wrong

Color: Misty.

Bouquet: You can really smell the Fruit Micro-Waxes!

Taste: Headache. Dizzy. Really made us wonder how latchkey kids do it.

Thud.

Have a great weekend, guys! Lerve!