FitVine Wine – We Gave it a Try

The 303 Staff recently had the opportunity to sample a new wine designed for athletes…  FitVine Wine’s motto is, “We crush grapes, you crush life.”

Professing to offer wines lower in calories and with hangover-avoiding properties, FitVine is quickly rising to the top of “healthy wine” web searches.
 
Apparently, it’s all in the processing: “Our proprietary process delivers high-quality wine rich in antioxidants, lower carbs & sulfites, and with zero residual sugar… To create wines that are both clean and rich in flavor and mouthfeel, we put our wines thorough malolactic fermentation and perform dry fermentation with no residual sugar levels. In doing this, our wines tend to have 1/3 less calories and carbohydrates than typical wines… Furthermore our fermentation process is extended 10-15 days in order to enhance the wine’s antioxidants and optimize its pH levels.”
 
And what about the sulfite-induced hangovers that can come from even moderate amounts of “regular” wines? “Our wines contain about 1/3 the sulfites of typical wines… without all the additives, sugars, and impurities that can wreak havoc on our bodies.”

And how do they taste? At our winter staff retreat six 303 staffers sampled the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Chardonnay.
 
The Chardonnay, aged in stainless steel instead of oak, was clean and crisp, but not as full bodied as the white wine drinkers in our crowd prefer – especially at a $16 price point. A few comments were “not very smooth,” “rough around the edges,” and “tastes more like a Sauvignon Blanc than a Chard…” However, knowing the purity with which the wine was processed, and better quality of ingredients being ingested left our group split on final assessment: half said they would buy the wine, being drawn by the health claims, and the other half said no, they would rather not have a glass of wine than have one that didn’t taste great.
 
Thoughts were similar on the Cabernet Sauvignon. One red wine drinker in our group thought the red was harder to like than the white. “The white is easier to get around in terms of taste compromises. The red just tastes average – like a less-than-$10 bottle of wine.” While the FitVine site describes the wine as having “rich purpose soft tannins,” our tasters found the tannin quite cottony and very drying.
 
It should be noted, however, both bottles of wine were finished (even though other wine was available throughout the evening).
 
Though our reviews were mediocre, the reasonable price point and health upside of these wines certainly warrant a try, and many reviewers recommend using the wines for sangria, mulled wine, or other similar recipes.