With all of the (frankly awful) stories about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex last week, I thought that the British media had finally stopped talking about Meghan’s As Ever wine. How wrong I was. It’s fascinating to watch their fixation with her wine in particular, right? Like… it’s just wine. Meghan’s been a wine-drinker and wine-lover for years. She named her blog after a wine. She clearly worked with a good winery and created a classy rosé which sold out within a couple of hours, just like everything else Midas-Touch Meghan puts her name on. Well, the Telegraph’s American associates finally got their hands on the As Ever rosé, and even after all of the gossip about the state of the Sussexes’ Netflix contract, the Telegraph was like “no, we’re still talking about this wine, damn it!” Someone named “Lottie Tiplady-Bishop” (I sh-t you not) wrote about a blind taste test she organized in Washington DC with a wine expert Diane Gross. Here’s part of what Gross said about the As Ever rosé:

To truly put the wine to the test, Gross conducted her tasting blind. As Ever was concealed in brown paper along with two other bottles, one from California and another Provençal rosé, to avoid bias. Once the glasses were poured, giving her first impression on what turned out to be the Duchess’s glass, Gross said the millennial pink wine is “the colour of rosé everybody likes.”

“I’m getting a little more on the nose here,” she said, adding it had notes of cooked fruit, red fruits, cherries, spice, and candy. Gross continued: “The wine isn’t sweet at all, it’s just sort of that top note of tutti frutti, like, it’s a little bit like your chewing gum. But it’s not a bad thing at all, it happens a lot in rosé.”

She also described the wine as a little “hot”, meaning that the taste of alcohol is a little overwhelming. In the blind test, Meghan’s wine was her least favourite compared to the other two pale rosés, a French blend with notes of lime and strawberry, and a citrussy Californian offering. However, she insisted she enjoyed it: “I like it, it just tastes like it has darker fruit notes. It has that sweet-salty finish that you sometimes get with rosé. It has a little bit of a blend, the fruit, and the minerality comes through.”

But asked if she’d take it to a dinner party the answer was a resounding no. “When I go to somebody’s house, I only take wine that I love. Whether it’s going to a party, and I’m bringing a $12 bottle, or I’m going to a nice dinner and I’m bringing a $50 bottle, I only take things that I absolutely love. Probably I wouldn’t take it for that reason, okay, but that’s [just] me. I don’t think it would be embarrassing to turn up with it. I think people would think it was super cool, and it tastes good.”

And the price point? “I don’t think anybody would be disappointed buying it at $30. It’s a tasty wine that folks will enjoy and not feel they have spent too much,” she said.

She conceded that the Duchess had given it a good go. Beyond having a “nice bottle” and a “pretty logo”, Gross said. “It seems like some thought went into this, and that there is the style that she’s trying to get to. For me, that means it was intentional and she was thinking about it, as she is tasting and figuring out what she wanted to do. She could have put her name on anything,” she said, adding: “This was an intentional project, where she really thought about what the wine represented, and what she wanted to represent, which was California.”

[From The Telegraph]

I found Gross’s analysis to be fair – everyone who’s sampled Meghan’s wine has talked about the high alcohol content, and people have consistently talked about the “fruity” quality too. But Gross liked the wine, she thought it was a solid effort from Meghan, and she thinks the price is on target too. Even funnier is the fact that “Lottie Tiplady-Bishop” also taste-tested the same group and the As Ever rosé was her favorite of the group. You can really feel the disappointment of so many of these “wine experts” who really wanted to hate on Meghan’s wine but they begrudgingly admit that Meghan made a good product. It keeps happening, and apparently this is also one of the summer storylines.

Here’s the full video of the NY Post’s blind test-taste from a few weeks ago, where they accidentally gave As Ever the highest mark (I cued it to the part where they’re tasting As Ever):

Photos courtesy of As Ever’s IG and Cover Images.