15 Oct Halloween wines…very scary!

Like vampires rising from the graves,

Halloween-themed wines are currently appearing at stores everywhere.

While many of these wines are available year round, they’re displayed front and center during the month of October.

Speaking of vampires, there’s Vampire Cabernet and Ghost this and Skeleton that.

It’s all quite fun and seasonally-appropriate.

We just struggle with the actual wine.

There’s no lack of labels referencing horror, mayhem and general bad behavior.

Most of the wines are red blends in the $10-$15 range.  We haven’t tried them all. Those that we have tried have been average.

With Halloween approaching, we became obsessed (incidentally, that’s the name of another “scary” wine…”Obsessed”) with finding a quality scary wine.

We focused on Phantom, a popular red blend that receives high marks from several wine critics.  Phantom is produced by the folks at Bogle, who have been a long history of producing over-achieving economical reds.

But our tasting panel…six colleagues who work in our office…said Phantom had a “great label” but the wine was just OK, not great.

Look, we don’t want to poison your party.  If you want to dial up the novelty at your Halloween gathering, sure, get your spooky on and grab a few of these seasonal reds.

But generally speaking, we believe there are higher-quality, better-value red blends, that don’t have werewolves and skeletons on the labels,  in the popular $10-$15 range.

No bones about it.