It’s all relative. That’s what they say.

Ask a wine critic what makes a great wine experience. You’ll probably hear words like balance, power, elegance, subtlety, beauty, depth. All expected, to some degree. All defensible. Respectable. Words you’d find yourself nodding along to as you hear them. But thing about your own wine experiences – your truly memorable wine experiences. (If you have had any – maybe you’ve never had a glass of wine before in your life. In that case, onward, ye temperate soldier! Cast not thine eyes upon the vines of treachery as thou drivest up Highway 29!) I’d be willing to bet that for nearly all of them, there’s a good story to go along with that wine.

Think about it – how many great wine experience stories go something like, “I bought this wine at the store. I took it home and drank it. It was great. It changed my life.” Probably not many – at least not that indistinct. If the wine really was that great, you probably remember what time of year it was, if not what day, who you were with, where you were, if you ate anything with it, and how long it took you to finish it off. Just like Tolstoy says, it’s all about context. Well first he says it’s about transitions, then context, but I can’t think of a good way to fit transitions into this discussion so forget that part. Who cares about Tolstoy anyway. Anna Karenina is overrated. That’s right, Nabokov, I said it!

All right, time for this post to go somewhere. Point is, wine is as much about the environment it is enjoyed in as it is about the quantitative pleasure that it itself can bring. And all of this goes a great deal toward explaining why I found the 2004 Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon, my contribution for this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday event, not all that bad of a wine. As box wines go, it probably isn’t the best you can find, or even the near-best, but under the right circumstances it can be enjoyed as a good sub-$10 bottle.

What’s that, you say? You’ve had Killer Juice Cab and it tastes like someone poured a gallon of grape juice into a pot, boiled it down to half its size, then left it to its own devices for a year in a basement? OK, that’s a valid opinion. I’m not here to say you’re wrong. As I said, it’s all about context. Let me set the scene for my tasting:  We were on a bus halfway up a mountain in the middle of the Mendocino County woods. Middle of the night. No electricity – not even a flashlight. A few candles so we could see what we were doing. For food, we had a takeout pizza we’d picked up from town half an hour back. That bus is a place I’ve spent a great deal of time in and around over the last five years, much of it spent with the two friends of mine whom I happened to be sharing the bus with at the time. So I was in a good place, but certainly not the kind of place one would normally conduct any kind of wine tasting. Did the context affect my perception of the wine? Hell yes. Do I care? Nope.

Oh right, tasting note. The Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon came in a three-liter box painted black with a wacky flaming logo. (Too dark in the bus for photos, sorry.) The spigot took some work to extract, which was mildly annoying, but we didn’t experience any drip problems like boxwines.org did. Once poured (into coffee mugs), this wine has a much more purplish tinge than most cabernet; at first glance one might take it for a petite sirah. Not much of a nose; grapey, a little sweet. On the palate, well, fermented grape juice…no harsh metallic taste or alcoholic burn, but not much other than some unassuming fruit, maybe of the blueberry variety. No finish to speak of. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll make this buy for my own kitchen any time soon. But as we huddled around the candles in the bus and ate cold pizza, it worked for us.

Thanks for the great topic, boxwines.org!