France - 10 Reviews

The naturally sparkling, salt free air that this company makes is my favorite. Oh wait that's not Perrier, that is Perri-air a hysterical fictional product from the Mel Brooks vehicle Space Balls. That is a great gag though. If you don't think so, you're either too young, or have no soul. You can be sure the science is solid behind that remark as well.

Even though it has been around forever this may be the first Perrier product I have ever drunk. It's sparkling mineral water and that is something that until recently I had no interest in. I've tried a few pink grapefruit seltzer waters and there is a difference between them and this flavored mineral water. I think I may actually prefer this because it has more substance. The grapefruit flavor isn't as strong and you can taste the minerals. It's a nice change up, and I'll certainly be drinking more of it. I never thought I would be sitting at home on a Saturday night drinking a bottle of Perrier. Oh how strange life has become.

To break up a 20 hour drive from the UK to Italy, we stopped in a town right outside of Dijon, France. I was one hungry little boy since the only vegetarian food I was able to find (that wasn't candy or chips) since we crossed into France was baguettes at a gas station. For the record they were warm and cost 60 cents each, in short they were wonderful, but I was starving. We finally got to our stop and hit up a grocery store. Let me tell you non-meat eaters/pseudo vegans of the world, when you can't read labels France is no place for our kind. Everything was meats and cheeses. I ended up getting a couple more baguettes and a handful of avocados for my day's meals. It some that may seem ridiculous, but it's actually what I eat a lot at home, so I was comfortable with my situation. While in the store I also picked up this bottle of soda on the cheap and I was very excited about it.

With this fancy bottle I really thought I was in for something special. Then I remembered that things just look fancier in Europe than they do back home in the US. It wasn't bad at all; it just didn't have that special pizzazz that I was hoping for. According to my traveling companions it tasted like a generic cola that they have back in Wales. I wish I remember what it was called, but the name escapes me. The thing is that even though it may be budget cola to them, it's made with beet sugar so it already has a leg up in my world. One would think that such a sweetener would give the cola an unusual flavor, but it tastes just like it was sweetened with cane sugar.

Had this been the first cola I had in France i probably would have enjoyed it immensely, but I had drunk a Coke earlier in our travels, and that blew the American version out of the water. A fountain Coke in Italy is better than most artisan sodas in the US. We're doing something wrong people.

Orangina is a trickster. It is in fact the Loki of soft drinks. You think to yourself, this is just carbonated orange juice, so it's the healthier choice. You down an entire huge bottle and then that jokester comes out to point out that yes there is orange juice in here, but there is also a cubic butt-load of added sugar as well. It has the same amount of sugar as Coke, according to the internet. Deceit!

Even though I have been tricked before, I still jumped at a chance to buy an alternate flavor that we do not have back home in the States. Rouge! I believe this is the same formula with the boring regular orange juice swapped out for blood oranges. The results are astronomically better. It's the perfect midpoint between a normal orange and grapefruit. With that in mind think of this as mixing orange juice with Squirt. Tasty indeed.

For added effect you may notice that the orange on the label has a devil cap and tail. I love that. I also love that it's made with real sugar in France and not high fructose corn syrup. We have a lot to learn America.

Let's cover something here: peaches in their natural state are amazing. They are one of the best fruits to ever grace this planet, from whatever galaxy they originated. Oh you didn't know that peaches are sentient beings from another world that we enslave and then consume? Now don't you feel like a savage? It's okay, if humans tasted as good as peaches, we would probably eat them too, so long moral decency.

So yes, peaches are nearly perfect. Artificial peach flavor? Not so much. I suppose it's fine in a pinch, but really there is no need for it when we have the entire species at our disposal. It always tastes too sweet and like candy. A big problem is that a lot of companies use this fake peach flavoring in their drinks and trick people into thinking that what they are drinking is how the wonderful fruit actually taste. It's nothing but lies.

Beverages, especially the sparkling ones that use real peach juice are few and far between. Val de France not only uses actual juice in their sparkling drinks, but they also do not add extraneous sugar. They do mix up their peach juice with some apple juice, but you can't blame them for that. They have to keep the price point down somehow.

This ends up tasting like a fancy soda pop, which is what it is. It's soda for the high class, or for those of us who want to pretend that we're classy for a short period of time. You can most definitely taste both the peach and apple juices in here. They exist in a harmony that is not to be disturbed with other ingredients.

My only complaint is that I poured myself a decent sized glass of this, and while it is delicious and only has 19g of sugar per each 8oz, it became too much once I got to the last quarter of the glass. So keep that in mind; this juice is made to be enjoyed in small quantities. If you do that you will certainly be pleased with your choice in beverage.

So let me get something straight here guys; French soda and Italian soda are the same thing? I've had Italian sodas for years. Typically served at “fancy” coffee shops. It's sparkling water with some flavored syrup mixed into it. I know that is essentially what soda pop is period, but this falls on the more setlzery side of things. Now here I sit drinking a French soda and it appears to be the same thing. Both are delicious, but differentiating between the two countries seems dumb to me. Simplification people. Simplification.

I will say that such drinks being served in coffee shops makes sense, because this does in fact taste fancier than your average soda. You feel more like an adult then a dumb kid. Okay, maybe you feel like you're in you're early 20's with not many responsibilities and you rage all of the time, making dumb mistakes, but you know what the score is about and this soda fits right into your world image. When you get older you'll get into the dryer sodas. That is when you know you are truly an adult. Until you get to that point, drink some fancy European sodas, while the person you are trying to impress, and consequently bed, is sipping on a soy latte, talking about how the world would be a better place if only everyone would listen to his/her thoughts. I simultaneously envy and pity you.

Enough of that; as I said this is seltzer water with a whole mess of sugar in it (actually maybe this is more for the kids) and some lemon-berry flavoring added to it. By red berries apparently they mean strawberries, because it's the only one listed in the ingredients. There is not a raspberry or cranberry to be seen. Strawberry and cranberry would be an odd paring, that I would happily try, but until the day that sees the light of day I will enjoy this bubbly treat that tastes like someone carbonated a strawberry lemonade.

American's will be in for a shock if they ever go to Europe and order lemonade, as more often than not they are carbonated. I don't understand why that is, but it's life. I was certainly surprised the first time it happened to me, but it was a good surprise. It doesn't end up being a standard soda. It's more like an Italian Soda aka carbonated juice. Instead of adding whatever other garbage is in your every day pop, it's like they took a glass of lemonade and just added bubbles. It's interesting, and a nice change of pace.

Now I knew this was carbonated, as it says so fairly large on the label. What tricked me this time is that I thought it was going to be lemon and lime with some blood orange mixed in. I mean what would you expect when you see the word “limonade?” In reality there is no lime contained, or lemon for that matter. I guess limonade is just a word that means any sort of ade made from a juice.

This has a nice blood orange flavor, that doesn't taste overly sweetened. The use of beet sugar was a nice choice. Now I want to go to the store, buy a bunch of blood oranges and make blood orange-ade. I bet it would be incredible and I could put the kids down the street's lemonade stand out of business. That will teach them to throw snowballs at my car.

You don't need to celebrate only good things. You can celebrate when bad things stop, or apologies. I guess those are good things, but it's not like, "Sally got a raise! Let's celebrate." I'm talking about things like "The dog stopped peeing on the carpet. Cause to celebrate." or, in my case, yesterday was a rough one. My boss yelled at me. Yeah, I was to blame, but it was the client that was making unrealistic demands and calling him every ten minutes saying, "Why doesn't this work? Why doesn't that work?" Literally, every ten minutes for five hours. If it wasn't such a high-power client, we would tell them what's what, but because of that, I felt the brunt of his rage.

I tried to make it up to him, which I think was successful, by buying him a doughnut and letting him celebrate with me about it not being yesterday. After five minutes of trying to get the G.D. cork off, we got it and it was bottoms up.

Taste? Fruity, but it didn't have a certain sharpness that I like in my non-alcoholic champagne. I know, I know. I'm hardly a connoisseur, but I've had my share of celebratory celebrations and I've had my share of faux champagne. It's got great flavor, as I mentioned, and is just right for two people to celebrate something like a dental cleaning, B on a science test, or good meal.

Before even opening this beverage I had an appreciation for it; mainly for it's use of a "Grolsch" top. I don't know if that's the official name, but that's what I've heard it referred to. I know that's the name of a beer company that uses the same design, so maybe it's just slang. Besides being visually appealing and fun to open they also wield a secret purpose. As someone who plays guitar (well bass, it's still a guitar) the annoyance of your strap coming unattached from your instrument while you play can be annoying and embarrassing. Sure you can go buy fancy strap locks, but who really wants to have to screw something into their instrument. The secret these bottles hold is that you can pop off the little rubber washer and put that over your strap after it's on your guitar and that strap won't be going anywhere. It's cheaper. It's easier. For that any company that uses this design gets a nod from me.

Flavor-wise this is also really great. A nice sparkling blood orange flavored lemonade. It's more blood orange than lemonade, which I enjoy. It also has the slight bitterness of an Italian soda, but it's from France. This could cause an international incident. They chose to sweeten this with beet sugar, which is interesting and it worked well for them. This is a fancy adult soda that I feel like I should be sipping on the patio of some cafe or another. Thumbs up all around.

I found this at Marshall's for the low price of $1.99 and thought that I could not lose. It's like a personal bottle of non-alcoholic wine. It's doubly the same size as a can of pop.

It was good, too. It tasted more like sparkling apple juice than sparkling apple cider. It was not too sweet.

I wish you the best of luck finding it. Not because it was at Marshall's and their entire stock rotates bi-weekly. I hope that I got their product name right. It was in French and that's what it was sans accents. If you can try it do it. It's cheap enough, jeez.

Anyone who has the sense of humor of a junior high student has had a good laugh at how the name of this product could be pronounced. I myself have that sense of humor. How can you not find it funny?
The drink itself is basically a carbonated orange juice with some other slight citrus flavors thrown in the mix. I really enjoy it, and I was shocked to find out that it has HFCS in it when I went to write this review. I never would have guessed it. My only complaint is that the pulp that's in it can be a little hard sometimes. It kind of weirds me out, and it makes me think that it's gone bad.