The gentrification of "bum wine"

In February 2008, right as the United States’ sub-prime mortgage crisis was beginning to metastasize into a global financial collapse, a guy from northeastern Pennsylvania launched a LiveJournal called “The Great Bum Wine Review.” Blogging under the handle Adins, he began posting tasting notes for America’s gruesomely hued bottom-shelf canon. Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird, Night Train… you name it.

It was a younger internet, and on it, applying superficially sincere evaluations of notoriously rough rotgut was a pretty reliable gag. Adins was hardly the only practitioner of this high-low approach, though the format would evolve over time. In 2014, for example, my one-time editorial home Thrillist published a post titled “Ranking the Top-5 Bum Wines,” mostly because ranking stuff was a reliable way to command attention in the in the pre-pivot-to-video heyday/wasteland of text-based listicles, no matter how arbitrary the ranking actually was. (Again: younger internet.) The joke, such as it was, turned on the accepted premise that street wine was bad and people drank it to get drunk, not for the taste. Not like real wine, in other words.

Of course, there’s always been real money in this seedy segment. (Just ask Gallo.) But these days, it’s also considerably less seedy. Shifts in production quality, consumption patterns, and mass media have made the American drinking public much more amenable to street wine. Bona fide fortunes have followed apace.

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