A Glass Act — the curious taste of the Freakshow Red Wine 2022

The label on this bottle features a lion-headed ringmaster in a crown, surrounded by circus tents and what appears to be multiple circus-related OSHA violations. It is the kind of packaging that screams for attention in a way that suggests the contents might not live up to the spectacle—a suspicion that, upon opening, proves correct.

Freakshow Red Wine 2022. Lodi, California. A blend of Syrah, Petite Sirah, and Souzão—three grapes that sound more exciting together than they taste. Roughly eighteen dollars retail, though this bottle arrived as a gift, sparing us the indignity of having paid for it ourselves while simultaneously suggesting that readers with surplus bottles and charitable impulses know where to find us. 15% alcohol—high enough to warrant a warning label, though not high enough to excuse the wine’s performance. The label does everything it can to convince you this wine is an experience; the wine does everything it can to convince you of the opposite.

Look: Deep plum, almost black. Rich, viscous, with legs that fall slowly enough to suggest substance. Visually, this wine exceeds expectations. Upon tasting, this will be the last time that sentence applies.

Nose: Faint to the point of being polite. Something earthy, vaguely sweet, possibly fruity if you squint—mostly just there, hovering at the edge of detection like a coworker you’re actively avoiding at the coffee machine. We say all of this knowing that much of the campus is engulfed in the yearly “epidemic of close quarters,” and no one has airways open enough to tantalize themselves with this faint musk.

Taste: Tart up front—sharp enough to make you wonder if this was intentional—then settles into something smooth and profoundly unremarkable: cherry, maybe… definitely grape. You can really taste the grape in this one, which is either a compliment or evidence that grapes were involved in production. Medium-bodied, heavier than it looks, lighter than 15% suggests it should be. In closing, this wine tastes like your childhood grape soda went off to college and started calling itself “complex.”

Finish: Brief. Exits like someone who just remembered they left the oven on. No lingering notes, no aftertaste worth documenting, just gone.

Serve it right: However you want. This wine has no opinions about temperature, glassware, or whether you’re drinking it from a mug at 2 a.m.—it accepts all conditions with the enthusiasm of a DMV employee on Friday afternoon, making you come back more than once to finish the job.

Pairings: Three-week-old tortilla chips. Dip of questionable provenance. Tuna mixed with queso, if your life has taken that turn. Conversations you’re pretending to follow. Background noise at gatherings where the lighting is charitable… this, at least, was our experience.

Verdict: The label promises a circus; the wine delivers a community theater production where half the cast called in sick—do I hear the people singing, singing the song of angry men? No, it is a thirty-five-year-old who has too much time on their hands and decided to give Les Misérables a try. Not offensive, not memorable, just aggressively adequate. The kind of bottle you finish because it’s open, not because it earned continuation. Drinkable in the way tap water is drinkable—functional, forgettable, and exactly what you’d expect from Stearns County’s finest hose bib. Somewhere between rural charm and municipal negligence, it doesn’t impress—but neither do we out here, and we’re doing just fine!

Rating: 6.5/10—All poster, no performance.

Freakshow wants you to believe you’re drinking something untamed and theatrical. What you’re actually
drinking is three grapes in a trench coat pretending to be interesting. The label works overtime so the wine doesn’t have to. If this is a circus, the performers called in sick and management decided to proceed with whatever interns were available. The show goes on. The show is fine. The show will not be discussed at breakfast.

— Gabe Evenocheck & Ben Bugbee

Subcommittee on Wine Standards and Lowered Expectations

(For those of legal drinking age only. Legal insisted, and we’ve learned not to argue.)