A Glass Act ­ — the unreachable dream, at Costco by the liter

We are adventurers. We are explorers of the vine, chroniclers of the grape, men who have stared down an $83 Oregon Pinot Noir and lived to write about it. We are, in the tradition of the great Spanish knight Don Quixote—a man so committed to his noble delusions that he attacked windmills on horseback and called it heroism—utterly incapable of accepting that some quests should not be taken. Don Quixote saw giants where there were windmills. We saw potential where there was a Costco. The results were similarly humbling. 

We present to you: Kirkland Signature Classic Red Sangria. 1.5 liters. Seven dollars. Product of Spain, which we mention because Spain deserves to know what is being done in its name. 

Look: Pale. Concerningly pale. We were promised boozy fruit punch. We were promised the deep, brooding crimson of a Spanish sunset over a vineyard that has seen things. What arrived in the glass was the color of a rosé that gave up. A rosé that received some bad news and decided not to recover. We held it to the light hoping for depth. The light passed straight through. We moved on. 

Nose & Taste: Sweet. Not “ripe fruit on a warm afternoon” sweet. Sweet in the way that makes you check the label to confirm this is wine and not a mixer that lost its soda. The Valencia orange, which the bottle mentions with considerable pride, does not so much complement the wine as replace it entirely — a hostile corporate takeover in which the orange arrived with a briefcase and the red wine quietly cleaned out its desk. We searched for complexity. We found none. We searched for the Mediterranean spices. We found something that might have been cinnamon or might have been the memory of cinnamon, which is a meaningful distinction and not one that resolved itself by the bottom of the glass. Here is our central grievance: we did not always know better. There was a time—innocent, uncomplicated, blissfully ignorant—when this bottle would have delighted us. Then came the Ken Wright. Then came the Prati. Our palates, against our will and without our consent, developed. We are victims of our own column. We are Don Quixote, except instead of windmills, we are fighting the creeping awareness that we can no longer unknow what good wine tastes like, and it has made us insufferable at a price point we can actually afford. 

The Six Percent: Six percent alcohol. We want you to understand what this means in practice. It means that after 1.5 liters of this sangria—a quantity we approached with the optimism of men who believe in the quest—we remained fully, mercilessly conscious. Conscious of our choices. Conscious of the glass. Conscious of each other, sitting there, completely lucid, having just consumed the rough equivalent of two bottles of wine and feeling precisely nothing except a mild awareness that we’d had a lot of orange. Six percent is not a wine. Six percent is a warning label that forgot to warn anyone. 

The 1.5 Liters: We will say this, and we will say it without irony because it is the truest thing in this review: not a drop went to waste. The bottle was large. The bottle was finished. Whatever this sangria lacked in complexity, proof, color and the basic dignity we have come to expect from fermented grapes, it made up for entirely in volume. This is its legacy. This is what we will remember. A 1.5-liter bottle under ten dollars, gone completely, a testament not to the wine’s greatness but to our own remarkable consistency of character. 

Rating: 6.8/10 — nearly all of which is the liter and a half. 

Spain tried. Costco delivered. We, as always, finished it. 

— Gabe Evenocheck & Ben Bugbee Department of Reluctant Sobriety, Iberian Bulk-Purchase Division 

(This column is for readers 21 and older, though at 6%, who cares.)