Europa ChocoVine – Original

Europa Chocovine

Imagine, if you will, the taste of dutch chocolate and fine red wine – only blended together into a brownish gray fluid and packaged in a bottle calling itself “ChocoVine”. Can your imagination handle that?. Try again – close your eyes, imagine that crisp alcoholic taste of a fine red wine, then imagine blending that with a couple chocolate bars. Could you do? I couldn’t. So it was with mouth literally agape that I stood facing the aisle-wide display for Europa ChocoVine at Trader Joe’s the day before Christmas.

I really feel like this is an amazing find, if only because it’s one of those products that makes you question your sanity and the sanity of all mankind. It’s the classic case of “A is good, and B is good, so naturally if we just smash them up into each other they’ll be great!”  Occasionally this works, occasionally it doesn’t, but just looking at ChocoVine the deck is stacked against it. Using the “judging a book by it’s cover” approach which, contrary to the advice of Levar Burton, I generally  find pretty effective ChocoVine does not have a lot going for it.

For one, I have a hard time telling people the name of the product without feeling stupid. It’s the sort of name that feels like it was brainstormed during a marketing meeting between an unimaginative person and a lazy person. “Wait a minute –  it’s chocolate and wine? Why not ‘ChocoVine’! That clumsy, obvious portmanteau does a great job conveying our core principals of elegance and decadence, right?” I don’t know, maybe it’s just the stripped down efficacy of the Dutch.

The name is not the first thing you’re going to notice about ChocoVine, however. The first thing you’re going to notice is the bottle. Behind the stock photograph of tulips and windmills is 750ml of fluid that looks, to put it generously, like ditch water. This is a bold move. I feel like normally, in the R&D process, someone is supposed to bring this up, maybe suggest that it’s going to be hard to sell a drink that looks like it was scooped out of a wet pothole. Europa went to market with it anyway – that shows some confidence.

So if you can get past appearances, what can you expect? What, to return to our thought experiment, does red wine blended with chocolate taste like? The answer, surprisingly, is a mudslide. That’s not to say the two taste identical, but they’re shockingly close. This is due in part to the large amounts of chocolate that have gone into the drink, but also thanks to a large amount of cream or, as the website puts it, “the finest Dutch cream”, that goes in as well. There’s almost nothing of the wine taste left in this drink by the time Europa has finished with it. Take a sip and you’ll be hit with a sharp bite, then swept up in a very sweet, very chocolaty liqueur taste, which finally fades into a subtle, almost imperceptible wine tail. It’s enough to make you wonder why Europa is so big on billing how fine the wine is that they’re using. They would be just as well off if they we’re using some of Trader Joe’s two buck chuck. That said, there’s nothing untasty about this drink. It’s sweet enough and chocolaty enough that you’ll be able to finish your glass.

If you’re looking for a substitute for a creamy, sweet, mildly alcoholic drink  this would be a great stand in for your Kahalua or Baileys – as long as you don’t mind the somewhat dismal look. Just don’t confuse it for a wine.

*The Nutrition Facts below are based on website data only. There is no nutrition information posted on the bottle so, you know, be a little dubious.

The  Breakdown

Would I Recommend It: A good gift for lovers of sweet liqueurs.

Would I Buy It Again: No thanks, I prefer mixing my own drinks.

Final Synopsis: Perfect if you like mudslides, pointless if you like wine.

Europa ChocoVine – Nutrition Facts