Minute Maid Cranberry Grape

When I was sixteen, I am ashamed to say that I used to take wine from the basement and bring it to my friend Justin's house. We used to sneak sips and hide it in the false, tile ceiling in his basement. That basement was great. We treated it with no respect and it showed. The way we treated that basement probably lowered the selling price by a bit. I think Justin told me that there were so many beer cans from him and his brother and their friends in the ceiling that they filled up a couple garbage cans. That basement was probably the last place I drank and that would have been in about 1998.

The one bottle of wine that we probably never finished was a bottle of red wine. It is the only red wine that I've ever had, and maybe the only wine I've ever had of any shade. This drink tastes like it. First sip I was immediately rewound back a dozen years into a basement that reeked of incense, bad music, and hormones, all covered in a thick layer of melted candle wax.

It's not a bad juice: very dark grapes and very dark cranberry. Pretty sweet and surprisingly HFCS'd first. I thought we were beyond that. It's a tame drink with no bitterness. Smooth, even. It's good, though, and now that I know what this one tastes like, I can get it any time I need to remember where I came from, a moldy basement where we built stadium seating out of some old couches and wood, a basement where we all made out with the same girl on separate occasions, a basement where we spent much of our high school days. A basement that now that I'm thinking about, makes me miss my dumb mid-teens. Now I'm listening to the Sneaker Pimps because that's what we would have been doing fifteen years ago.