The bottom of the barrel in booze
One of my favorite sites is Bumwine.com, which can tell you all about some of the most awful wines ever made. The site is all about wines bums drink - you know, the people who panhandle on the street corner who “just need a little change to get something to eat,” then head straight to the liquor store as soon as you’ve donated and gotten out of sight.
Bums tend to prefer “fortified wines,” wines with extra alcohol added, because that’s how they get the most bang for the buck. Where regular wine tends to contain 11.5-15% alcohol, bum wines run in the 17.5% to 18% range.
One of the most famous bum wines is one you may have tried in college - MD 20/20. MD stands for “Mogen David,” but everyone refers to the wine as “Mad Dog 20/20.” Other famous bum wines include Cisco (which was forced by the federal government to print “this is not a wine cooler” on the label), Night Train, Wild Irish Rose, and perhaps the grandaddy of all the bum wines, Thunderbird. I bought a friend a bottle of the Bird as a gag gift and tried a sip. Let me tell you, if you never broke into the utility cabinet and took a swig of Drano as a kid, Thunderbird is a pretty close approximation.
The bum wines tend to sell for $2-3 for a 750 ml bottle here in Memphis, home of the Mid-South Alcoholic Supply World Headquarters. Based on the trash left outsde the liquor store around the corner from the World HQ, Mad Dog 20/20 and Wild Irish Rose appear to be the most popular wines consumed by bums in Downtown Memphis.
The preferred way to drink these wines is straight out of the bottle, wrapped in a brown paper bag, but if you want something a little classier, Mid-South Alcoholic Supply has a wide range of glasses to choose from.
