Cheap booze reviews? Seriously? Seriously!

For some reason, I’ve run across a couple of sites lately that do nothing but review the cheapest, nastiest wine and malt liquor on the planet.

While other “booze review” sites tend to portray a sophisticated image, BumWine.com and 40ozMaltLiquor.com go in the opposite direction. Those sites, of course, stick with the nastiest hooch they can find and gleefully review it.

Let’s take a look first a BumWine. If you haven’t hit the link to head over there yet, you really should – the banner alone is worth the price of admission. Rarely has a take-off on the illustration representing the evolution of man been such a hoot.

The entire site is knee-slapping funny, in fact, as the folks at BumWine review some of the worst wines imaginable. Yes, Night Train, Cisco, Thunderbird, MD “Mad Dog” 2020 and Thunderbird are all given the “this stuff is cheap and nasty, but we love it” treatment and the reviews and features will provide a heck of a lot of entertainment.

I’ve got a great Night Train story, by the way. When I was in college, I drove to the liquor store with a couple of friends of mine. One of them bought two huge bottle of Night Train and he chugged one in the back seat of my Subaru before we got back to campus.

“Hey, shut the hell up!” I demanded.

“Take it easy on him, man,” my sober friend in the front seat said. “This is his first train ride.”

The other site – 40ozMaltLiquor.com – sticks with reviewing cheap  wine’s raunchy sibling. The reviews over there are a heck of a lot of fun, too, and I particularly appreciate the occasional videos in which one of the site owners knocks back a bottle of malt liquor and describes the experience in great detail.

Again, I’ve got another great story about malt liquor from my college days. See, we adored Olde English 800 (and cheap wine, for that matter) as we did like to drink a little bit. Back then, you could get a 40-ounce bottle of 8-ball for around $1.25. If you drank one of those, you were feeling OK. If you drank two, you forgot where you were, who you were and how to walk. That’s a lot of damage done for $2.50.

I’m mentioning all of this for a couple of reasons. First of all, I just think those two sites are a hoot. Second, they do remind me of my drinking days back in college.

When I think back to those, I recall the time I went with some friends to an off-campus party. One of those fellows decided he was going to keep up with how much he drank, so he brought along a pen and decided to make a mark on his arm for every beer he drank.

At the first of the evening, the lines were neat and vertical. As the night wore on, those lines got larger, more horizontal and downright impossible to count.

I am certain that we couldn’t abuse ourselves to that extent and get away with it these days – we’re just too damned old. Still, nostalgia is a good thing.