Goya Grape Soda

Goya Grape Soda

Here's a funny lamp and a funny plant
failing to give the bottle scale.

Believe it or not, this is a grimace of pleasure...

...and so is this.
You should see the face I pull in the bathroom.

So I have to get my wife's permission to mention her on this blog. Sometimes I am too flip in the way I talk about her, writing in a way I believe that anyone would realize is "all in good fun". Sadly, good fun is not my wife's way, so we strike Bargains.

To get permission for the previous blog, I had to strike out one phrase and replace it with another. (Note: At this point I in the original version of this entry I refer to the thing she made me strike out, explaining it. She saw THIS post and me me remove it again). More importantly, part of the bargain involved her picking out a soda for me to drink, right now and no fucking around.

Reaching this Bargain wasn't easy, and it involved her getting flustered and calling me a "spucker", but it was finally struck and I drank what was essentially a melted grape popsicle.

How can someone yell "Don't take my picture!"
and suck grape soda out of a bottle at the same time?

Goya Grape Soda smells slightly alcoholic and really, really grapey. The taste, like I said, is more like a melted grape popsicle than any other thing. Mulling it over, I think this not just because of the chemical grape taste, but because of the low carbonation. For a soda, this stuff hardly fizzes. Not that this is bad, it's actually quite good. The lack of fizz lets the sweet come through, and the grape isn't so strong that it has to fight with any of the other qualities.

Why do some flavors of soda suffer so hideously from the foul corn syrup taste? Goya Grape Soda is perfectly tasty. Do colas have a secret weakness when it comes to the sweet of the corn? Is it their Kryptonite?

I'll confess I had some trepidation. Goya isn't known for their delicious sodas as much as their starchy canned goods. But this stuff is good, my wife and I both agree that we'd drink more if given the chance. I'll hunt for another bottle in the canned bean aisle, next time I'm at the supermarket.

The bottle, though, puzzles me. The running theme of the company is Spanish foodstuffs, this bottle bears a single Spanish word, "Refresco". Nothing else on it is in Spanish, and the distributor is listed in Secaucus, New Jersey. Why that single word of Spanish? Is it meant to show the Hispanic Goya buyers that the company is still 'keeping it real'? Is the company trying to lure non-Hispanics in with the exoticism of the language?

Either way, the ink isn't directly printed on the bottle, instead it has little plastic labels stuck to it bearing all the "Refresco" this and "Artificial Flavor" that. I hate that.

Speaking of the label, check out the crazy dithering in that whispy purple band that runs around the outer edge of the graphic. That's crazy. I feel like I'm playing an illustrated text adventure on Commodore 64. And those grapes, they're all semi-transparent. Clearly their not grapes. To tell the truth, this is sort of what I imagined the thing looked like in "The Colour Out of Space". Didn't it lay eggs at one point? Or am I confusing the original story with the Cthulhu Now adventure about the same thing?

Look at that dithering. Look at it, but not too close,
for there lies madness.