Fall, Part 2

I'm a marketer's dream - the moment something is marked "limited release" or "seasonal offering," I will almost certainly buy it. Sometimes it works out. Other times, it really, really doesn't.

I even have apples in the background. Fall is fun.

Now, I'm not willing to write-off hard cider just because it's not beer, or because it seems really girly. I enjoy a good cider. This is not a good cider. I should also mention incidentally that this is one of those situations where I really REALLY wished I could have just bought a single rather than a sixer.

"Hint of American White Oak."

I don't think hint means what you think it means.

So Woodchuck Fall Cider has "a unique taste and special aroma" does it? This is a situation where the whole is so, so much worse than sum of its parts. Cinnamon (check), nutmeg (check), American white oak (check), add together to produce a sickeningly cloying artificial flavor (check, and mate). Here's where I think this thing breaks down - I think it's just too many things that kind of work together.

Apples and cinnamon is kind of a standard flavor combination. Nutmeg is in a lot of apple pie recipes, so let's throw that in. At this point, this cider could have been fine - probably the apple equivalent of pumpkin beer. But they had to go and use American oak for the finishing.

Oakiness, in fine wine, is a result of aging in oak barrels. It's what gives a wine complexity, with flavors of caramel and butter and, yes, vanilla. Apparently, though, cheap winemakers age their wine in steel vats and just toss oak chips into the wine. This allows for less of the caramel and butter and rich flavors, and tends to highlight ONLY VANILLA. Woodchuck sells its sixer of Fall cider for, oh, $9. Do you think they use fine oak barrels, or oak chips (wikipedia even suggests that oak powder can be used? gross).

It was a really cute label too.

All Autumnal, with nice colored leaves.

So this cider doesn't taste like Fall as much as it tastes like a poor Yankee Candle facsimile of Fall. I tasted a lot of vanilla, a lot of sugar, barely any hint of apple, some coconut (I think by this point my palate was totally shot), and what under any other circumstance would probably have made me think of a dish of potpourri. I didn't finish mine. My fiancée didn't finish hers. And now I have four freaking bottles of it stuck in my fridge.