Food: Cheerwine

I'm sitting here drinking my first ever Cheerwine. I'd heard of it, of course. I've listened to people rhapsodize nostalgically about it . . . Though they always seemed to finish with, "It's actually not very good." Huh?

Apparently Cheerwine inhabits a place in many people's childhoods (at least people I know). We didn't have it where I grew up, but I found it at a store the other day and decided to give it a try.

The bottle (I bought one individual bottle as a tester) reads: "Legend since 1917." Um, okay. It also says the drink is made with cane sugar, wild cherry, and other natural flavors. Is it all natural? Seems unlikely. But it is milder than a lot of other colas. My first impression was that it didn't have much flavor at all, that despite its carbonation it was somehow flat.

However . . .

The more I drank it, the more I could taste it. (It may also have benefitted from my having poured it out of the glass bottle and into a cup with a straw.)

I like cherry-flavored things in general. Cherry Coke, black cherry drinks, Black Cherry Dr Pepper, cherry sours. (Come to think of it, my car is a color known as "dark cherry.") Cheerwine is definitely cherry once you get a bit of build up out of it; unlike Cherry Coke, the cola part in Cheerwine is in the minority in that you don't taste much "cola" at all.

Also, it leaves my mouth feeling a bit dry.

Final verdict: I like it but don't love it. Though it's the kind of drink I can imagine developing a taste for over time, on the whole I probably wouldn't buy or drink it regularly.