arbor mist??

[curious]

okay, I may get blasted for this but I am confused. I thought that "wines" like Arbor Mist, Boones Farm and such weren't really wines.
Today, I finally made it to the wine store (chapter one of seminar paper is finished!!)
The lady there remembered me, and we talked about wines. She suggested that hubby and I start out with Arbor Mist, a Blackberry Merlot and a Chardonnay tropical fruit. She said that they were wines which had some extra fruit juice added, to help them taste sweeter.
I also picked up a bottle of Sutter Home 200 Musacato; a Rosemont Estate Grenache Shiraz, 2001 (had silver medal award class 12 label on it) and a wine that had a label that stated:
frattelli Cella Lambrusco Di Modene,
soft red wine. Couldn't find a year on it.

She is expecting a Hogue's Late Harvest Riesling in tomorrow. She carries Bonnie Doon, French Fat Bastard,and some others I had written down to find, but was out of them.
Any input on what I picked up?
And on if Arbor Mist is a wine, or a fruit juice or what?
Janette

[Kcwhippet]

Arbor Mist is fruit juice, sugar, water, preservatives and some inferior wine. Think about it - if the wine was any good at all to drink by itself, would any sensible winery want to adulterate it with all that other stuff?

[wondersofwine]

The Lambrusco should be somewhat sweet if that is what you like and Bonny Doon makes some good wines. I prefer several California late harvest rieslings to the Hogue riesling. Greenwood Ridge has a very nice one some years (I don't think they produce a late harvest wine every year) and Arrowood is another good producer. They may cost more than the Hogue.

[dananne]

I love Bonny Doon, and when I really started drinking wine those are the wines that got me going. The Big House white and red are both generally consistent, and they make a nice, inexpensive syrah from France called Domaine du Blagueurs, which is hard to miss with a playful jester on the label. Bonny Doon also makes a Pacific Rim riesling that you may enjoy. It's got an Asian woman on the label, in case you want to look for that one, too. I like the Hogue riesling, but my wife finds it too sweet for her tastes. The Rosemount is a pretty good pick, too. The others, such as Arbor Mist, I've never had the urge to try. I've recommended Lambrusco for some friends who wanted to move from the white zins of the world into reds, and they've generally liked using it as a stepping stone.

[passivetyrant]

Actually if you read the bottle of Arbor Mist, it refers to itself as a "wine product". My friend recieved a bottle and we tried reducing it to be served over vanilla ice cream. We weren't sure what the results would be being that it is a carbonated beverage. It ended up far to sweet for our palates, but that may have been my mistake for reducing it too much.
If you are looking for a sweet wine, I would avoid these type of products and lean to a sauvignon blanc or even a dessert wine like a muscat. You can enjoy the sweetness and still talk amoungst "the wine snob crowd"

[curious]

Thanks all,

The lady at the wine store recommended the arbor mist as a starting point, she said that a lot of people who had never drank wine started with those, and then after getting used to the alcohol taste, advanced onto the better wines.

I will pick up the other suggestions this weekend. Since we are still new to this, we wanted to work our way up.
I guess we are being like kids, lol, drinking koolaid before we move onto pop [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/smile.gif[/img] then next, we will drink the grownup stuff <BG>
right now, I just want hot choc, got home from class and the temp is -9 (wind chill), will be at 0 tonight, tomorrow will be 14 degrees, next day 22 degrees.
I can look on the bright side, in three days, it is supposed to be 52 degrees--a heat wave! wonderful Ohio valley weather!!