Bitch Vs. Douche! The Wine Tasting

By Sherrie Gulmahamad on June 1st, 2009

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So. It’s come to this.  

Christian Audigier thinks he can make wine now? 

I stood dumbstruck in the massive Whole Foods in Pasadena, gawking at a display of Ed Hardy wines, the gaudy labels covered in those signature tattoo designs, so ubiquitous in certain parts of the city. In certain nightclubs it nearly qualifies as camouflage. But as I get older, I’ve become more of an annoying contrarian.  It wasn’t enough for me to write off this wine without drinking it. I am now old and curmudgeonly enough to try it for the sake of trying it.  So I did something I thought I’d never do, I gave some money to Christian Audigier and bought a bottle of the Cabernet. 

Still, all wine, no matter how douchey the winemaker, deserves the fairness of a blind tasting.  I decided to match it up against a budget bottling from Australia found in the same store, called Bitch, whose little pink label with classy lettering is delightfully giggle-worthy. My first thought: Hmm, the bitches must be on to this.

The Tasting
I wrapped up both bottles in recycled black plastic bags from the liquor store, poking only the mouth of the bottle out of a corner of the bag, and then closed my eyes for the requisite switching them around back and forth until neither bottle was known to me.  I had the BF join me, in the hope that the tasting would reveal gender preferences or, at least, reveal secretly that my BF likes wine for doucehbags (oh nooo).

Wine number one was dark and hearty in the glass.
BF: It smells like wine.
Me: That’s helpful.
BF: I mean it doesn’t smell like anything. Just alcohol. 
Me: It tastes kind of chalky?  
BF: It tastes like alcohol.
Me: Maybe we should decant it.  Aw fuck it, it’s too late for that. 

Wine number two was lighter in the glass, and smelled immediately like strawberries & cherries on the nose.
BF: Mmm, fruity.  
Me: It’s elegant and light in the mouth. No dragon alcohol breath afterward.
BF: Aw, come on, did you cheat, one of these wines is clearly better than the other. 

After an extra glass we both decided number 2 was the winning wine.  And the ref calls it!  Bitch trumps douche!   

Extra Evidence…
It might be good and fine to run willy nilly through wine aisles grabbing bottles due to their eye-catching labels, but an extra scanning of said bottles would have yielded a few more clues.  The Ed Hardy bottle doesn’t give you region or estate information, it simply says ‘Vin de pays d’oc’.  This means the wine came from well, anywhere in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France.  The Bitch bottle, on the other hand, gives you a winery name (R Winery) and contains grapes from the highly regarded Barossa region of Australia. And, an extra Google search on the Bitch wine yields the information that the Bitch wine in 2007 landed a 90 point review from Robert Parker, wine god guy.

Final Analysis
It has been proven scientifically that it is better to be a bitch than a douche.