Grappa distillery Mazzetti d'Altavilla's Essentia Vitae, recently launched in Germany and Italy, is a beverage designed to appeal to female consumers by evoking fine fragrances, packaged in strange, perfume-shaped bottles. There are three different "scents" available: No 4 Ruche (jasmine-scented), No 6 Malvasia (rose), and No 8 Moscato (violet).
— Read more at Wine for women - with a lovely bouquet at the Guardian.
This kind of condescension burns me up! And I can’t think of anything more disgusting than floral wines. Give me a bottle of Camus Cabernet any day. Funny… now that I think about it in the context of perfume, $75 for a bottle doesn’t seem expensive at all.
That’s exactly what I was thinking, how absolutely f***ing insulting!
(I regularly drink bigger and badder wines than my father, btw.)
They do not sound appealing to me, but then I do wonder if they’d appeal to people who did not normally drink wine? No idea.
Perhaps because I am a bottle ho and I love glass, I think the bottles are pretty! And I am not a wine drinker, so I am not appalled by the idea of a floral wine; as an avid gardener, I’m ashamed to admit that a rose or violet scented wine sounds rather lovely. But perhaps those notes are more suited to tea?
I think this is a bad idea, because I don’t think anyone would even be in the wine section unless they were looking for wine, and it sounds as though the wine itself will not appeal to wine enthusiasts…..but if I happened to see it somewhere, I’d pick a bottle up, just because it looks different.
Definitely of the peasant class, I guess!
Tea, yes, good idea. Wine, I think probably not, although some wines, especially muscat, have wonderful floral aromas themselves. (Burgundy fans go on and on about violets.) Gotta say, though, speaking for myself, those perfume-shaped bottles do not say, “drink me!”
Yeah, well, when I don’t feel like worrying my pretty little head about wine labels, I just bust out the Wild Turkey.
Drinking from one of those bottles would make me feel like Scarlett O’Hara gargling cologne to cover her booze breath.
I’m lusting after a bottle of Templeton Rye myself, but by the time I find out a new batch has hit the stores…well, it’s time to start waiting for the next batch to hit the stores. Problem with that is that…well, it typically sells out in a day (in advance sometimes, even) and it’s months before there’s more. *le sigh*
Oh well. That’s what Jim, Johnny and Jack are for.
And dear Old Grand-Dad.
(BTW, nice to meet a fellow rye drinker!)
Hear hear! I get so tired of hearing “d’you know you drink like a dude/guy/bloke?” (Last leveled at me by the husband of a good friend…he’s a OTR truck driver from Leeds.)
I’m offended by the notion that the best way to get women to drink wine is to give it floral notes and package it in pretty perfume-like bottles. And I’m a man.
Also, since when don’t women like wine?
It was news to me too…would have assumed men & women bought wine in equal amounts. But perhaps that is not so.
There is definitely a perception in the industry that wine is a more masculine interest. I am always frustrated in restaurants when I ask for the list and it is handed to my partner, then I select and order the wine and it is still given to him to sample. Grrrrr! Bad manners too.
Wow, I must be more visibly evil than I thought…the only time I’ve asked for a wine list and it’s been given to my dinner companion, I was out to dinner with my mother.
Er…he didn’t make that mistake again, when he brought the selection…hmm….
I’m a fan of any way anyone wants to dress up drinking, the more accoutrement the better…. But they could have don’t so much better than those bottles? At least go with the condescending idea and put it in rose colored glass with some frills and curves? HA and how about the dispenser being a bulb atomizer? For a liqueur maybe I would buy that just as a conversation piece to keep in the bar cabinet.
I wonder if these things are really wine, or scented grappa, in other words, more like liqueurs? I adore lemoncello and wouldn’t mind trying these floral versions, although I most appreciate grappa in a caffé corretto.
It seems that they are wine, but I agree with the grappa idea. One of my favourites is a gewurztraminer grappa that has a really beautiful, high rose note and I can definitely see it packaged in a perfume-y bottle, though a lot of the higher-priced spirits (especially cognacs) seem to take that approach anyway.