Blame Millennials: Blue Wine Is Now a Thing
Planet Earth, 2016, is one of extraordinary culinary delights. We can eat burgers sandwiched in noodle buns, cake made out of water, donuts covered in precious metals… only where, pray tell, can we find ourselves some innovative liquids?
Wonder no longer. Our friend, Spain, who has already been overly generous with us by creating international treasures like Javier Bardem and cured ham, has gifted us with the most innovative beverage to date—blue wine—and it’s called Gik. Fitting. Like the concept itself, the name, too, is super weird.
According to Eater, six young Spanish entrepreneurs—who grew up in a culture of wine traditionalists—wanted to take one of the world’s most revered beverages and make it more fun, i.e., turn it into a drink that appeals to millennials, who, they apparently believe, lack taste and standards. Not only is this drink the color of one of Enya’s best songs of all time, “Caribbean Blue,” they also made it taste more like alcoholic Capri Sun by adding a calorie free sweetener. Clásico.
But before you go and laugh away Gik as a joke of an imbibe-able liquid, hear out its legitimate underpinnings: a “blend of red and white grapes predominantly sourced from vineyards in La Rioja, Zaragoza,”—that’s “Zaragotha” to you—”Léon… and Castilla-La-Mancha,” which are all cities a few hours North and South of Madrid, Eater explains. Plus, the blue color itself comes from natural pigments located in grape skin, called anthocyanin, and from an indigo dye derived from the Isatis tinctoria plant. So take that smirk off your face, haters. JK, you can put it back on because of its non-colonic sweetener. Real food has calories.
You can currently purchase Gik from its website, other European countries, and, soon, the US, its founders hope. If you manage to get your hands on it, it will only set you back about 11 big ones.
And if you do—or shall I say, when you do—don’t you worry about what to eat with it. While bottles of real wine come with “tech sheets” that suggest food pairings, Gik wants you to be as casual with your Gik-paired meal as they are about adding the color blue to it.
“We do not believe in wine tasting rules and we don’t think that anybody should need to study the bible of enology to enjoy a glass of wine. That is why we made an anti-technical sheet.”
What’s on it? Sushi, nachos, and guacamole, for starters. Buen provecho.
Image via Gik Instagram