For the purposes of this exhaustive guide to all things “Mom wine,” here are the two rules of what constitutes a Mom wine:
- One 750mL bottle can cost no more than $15. There are no exceptions.
- Mom wine varieties include: Pinot Noir, Merlot, Syrah, Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc. While your mom did kill that bottle of Korbel sparkling wine left over from your cousin’s engagement party before leaving a voicemail about how much she doesn’t trust your new boyfriend, technically sparkling wine does not count. Sorry. Rules are rules.
Still, two Golden Rules notwithstanding, the most important quality of a Mom wine is that its consumption is saved for distinctly Mom occasions. These include 10 p.m. text messages about your younger brother’s report card, or emails about the Yahoo! article she read illustrating the undeniable link between heart disease and skinny jeans.
Here is an excellent Mom wine, a 2010 Pinot Noir from Smoking Loon. This wine, “crafted for those with an appetite for adventure,” is a great fit for Moms who share BuzzFeed quizzes proving her theory that “you really should have majored in biology instead of an art history.”
Source: Don Richards/Creative Commons
Another strong Mom wine is the Francis Coppola Diamond Merlot. This smooth red goes well with a late-night weekday phone call from Mom insisting “we never talk anymore,” and its fruity taste nicely pairs with her complaint about how “your brother never calls either, but you’re supposed to be the GOOD child.”
Source: Maegan Tintari/Creative Commons
Another classic Mom wine is the Yellow Tail Shiraz, best suited for moms who want to stay in and watch Jeopardy! instead of go to a late-night board meeting. Also good for Moms who recently discovered Pinterest and unknowingly tied their boards to Facebook status updates.
Source: Mary Witzig/Creative Commons
The best Mom wine for groups, however, is the undisputed bulk-packaging champion Carlo Rossi. Fun fact about this Mom wine: researchers have determined that approximately 2.5 four-liter bottles of Carlo Rossi cabernet is the amount required to satisfy a single eight-Mom book group discussing “The Secret Life of Bees.”
Source: CarloRossi.com
And, finally, perhaps the Queen of the Mom Wines — Clos du Bois Chardonnay. Flavored with hints of pineapple and vanilla, this goddess among Mom wines is described by Moms I know as perfect for “tuning out the motherfucking piece of shit dog,” or as a great companion for reality television. Available at liquor stores, corner stores, and supermarkets most everywhere, this mild white is the platonic ideal of Mom wines.
Source: WalMart.com
Tags: i’m sure your mom drinks straight scotch and breaks glass bottles with her teeth, mom wine, moms, noah kulwin, poking gentle fun at those we love, wine
I WAS A MOM ALL ALONG
Me too. I totally have a bottle of that chardonnay in my pantry. And Coppola Claret is really good.
Me too, especially if Yellow Tail sangria counts.
BECAUSE IT’S WINE WITH SUGAR AND FRUIT FLAVOR, I MEAN COME ON
If I am not yet a mother but intend to be one later can I start early or does that make me some kind of cheapo wanna-lush?
That is to say I already drink all of these because $$$ and ‘fuck it’ feelings. Also I watch Jeopardy, so maybe I am secretly a mom and I don’t know it.
you’re not a mom until you send group texts to your grown children of something completely unrecognizable and the caption “REMEMBER THIS”
…my mother-in-law sends group messages for EVERYTHING. “Need anything from Costco?”
“Oh, Gato Negro is $4.49? Guess I know what I’m drinking tonight.”
I feel you, lady. Cheap wines forever.
My mom loves Gato Negro! She excitedly told me all about it and was somewhat devastated that they didn’t have it at the store near my house.
Rex Goliath is reliably under $5 at my nearby supermarket, so that tends to be a thing I have in stock at all times.
Rex Goliath is what I get when I get the big bottles! Definitely just spent the weekend down the shore drinking a lot of Rex.
MOMS ALSO APPRECIATE THAT $5 ROSE WITH THE GOAT ON THE LABEL FROM TRADER JOE’S, EXCELLENT MOM WINE GUIDE
Curse you Massachusetts, you Puritan-ass state with no alcohol at TJ’s (Other mom thing: calling Trader Joe’s TJ’s).
Cambridge TJ’s has wine, and maybe one or two others. But you’re right, it pretty much sucks.
I was going to say, there needs to be a rose on this list. Also, sometimes my mom “makes” her own sparkling rose by mixing a mom-approved red wine with Andre champagne. I love her.
Blue Nun for my mom.
My parents were not big drinkers and therefore my mother kept a stock of those little 4-bottle Sutter Home “kitchen wine” sets. Anybody else grow up with tiny wines?
My Mom is big on good wine, but Grandma requests that we buy her the four-packs of miniature cheap white wine so she can drink it on her own.
YES, my mom always has a stash of those, though she drinks them so infrequently that they’re usually at least 4 years old.
I once had a neighbor who used to get in drunken screaming matches with her boyfriend. She one day stopped by with a pint of ice cream she asked me to hide from her boyfriend in my freezer. When she returned to claim it, she brought a tiny bottle of Korbel as a thank you. Every time I see a tiny bottle of wine I think of her and her now ex-boyfriend, both of whom stopped drinking after they broke up.
I was once given, as a delightful gift, a Sutter Home-branded wine cozy sized to fit those bottles.
We don’t have most of those here. Mum Wines here include: Black Tower Chardonnay, Any white or rose that is on 2 for £10.
You can have nicer stuff, but someone else has bought it for you.
2 for £10 is how I get by in life. That or Tesco “better than half price deals” on wines I actually really like… it’s like winning the booze aisle lottery every time.
2 for 10 wine was my fav thing about grocery shopping in London
Don’t forget about Prosecco (all/any brand) for all the brunching moms out there!
Damnit. Just saw sparkling wines don’t count. Brunch Moms unionize and demand to be heard!
My mom wouldn’t know a Prosecco if it bit her in the ass, but I (as a mom myself) will join your union and we can drink all the Proseccos and Lambruscos.
and here I was thinking that the broke-ass student union has already monopolized the Lambrusco
There is a retired physics prof at my church who is ALL ABOUT the prosecco at church brunches/altar guild meetings/every occasion. I’d never heard of it before he brought it to some occasion, so now I think of prosecco as a sciency dude wine. It’s good stuff!
I’m a mom and it’s 12:15 on a Thursday and the kids are at the sitter’s and I’m drinking Chardonnay. #momlyfe
My mom always has a magnum of Fetzer Chardonnay in her fridge, but if the Clos du Bois is on sale at Kroger she’ll go ahead and get 6 bottles to get the 10% off with the plus card. She always brings prosecco when she comes to my house, though, because my mom is the best.
My mom’s Wine Occasions include: getting home and sitting down; eating that weird cheddar popcorn while reading a Winston Churchill biography in bed; using her iPad on the patio to browse Amazon; and watching the Kennedy Center Honors and eating a slice of sausage pizza.
It’s weird to find out your mom has a second family like this.
I am bookmarking this page so that when I feel lost and directionless on the long, meandering path that is life, I can easily return to this description of everything I aspire to have, to hold, and to sip.
She is one of the truly admirable humans that exists in this world.
My mom is basically married to cheap hooch and used to drink only 3-buck Chuck. But now she’s gotten all environmental and healthy, so she only drinks organic cheap hooch from Harris Teeter.
Whenever she visits me, I know she’s secretly looking askance at every bottle of hard liquor I own, as if somehow I’m an alcoholic because I like a bourbon now and then. (Wine, apparently, doesn’t count as drinking.)
MOMS. My mom also doesn’t think wine counts as drinking. My proclivity for beer or gin and tonics, however, is HIGHLY questionable and also scandalous
Um it’s not alcoholism if it’s in a fancy glass duh.
“Mommy doesn’t get drunk, she just has fun.” — Lynn Belcher, the most mom of all moms
Oh man, my mom used to buy Smoking Loon and Yellow Tail all.the.time.
What, no mention of box wine? My mom and grandma use to spend every weekend sitting at the table drinking box wine and just shooting the breeze. Ah, good times. Now I miss my grandma. 🙁
My grandpa will refill an empty bottle of niceish wine that had been gifted to him with suuuuuper cheap boxed wine.
Drinking there is always a roll of the dice, but fun!
Haha my husband does this with the one bottle of grey goose he was gifted and duty free smirnoff. #future(cat)grandpa
GODDAMN DO I MISS CHEAP BOOZE. I will cheerfully and happily drink every single one of these wines, but the goddamned LCBO wants to put me in the poorhouse. ($7.95 for the cheapest bottle of wine you sell? $16.95 for Clos du Bois? No, you impoverish me, and I will not drink rather than spend that kind of money on cheap wine.)
Yeah, I sob a little inside when I see Americans talking about buying $5 wines. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bottle for under $8 in BC, and the $8 ones are TERRIBLE. That is why I have taken to making my own wine. It tastes about as good as cheap wine and is $3 a bottle.
I’ve definitely drank my fair share of $7.95 Copper Moon and what have you, but it was not….you know….the world’s best wine experience. (Nor was the $8.95 XOXO or whatever. Oh god.)
TRUTH. Have you tried the champagne yeast in juice thing that was floating around here a few weeks ago?
I spent a month studying in Florence. The wine there was SO CHEAP. When I came back and saw that the bottle of spumante I would buy for 2 euro at the tiny grocery store was $15 at the LCBO, I almost broke down.
I once spent 80 eurocents on a full-sized bottle of wine and that shit was perfectly drinkable. ITALY I MISS YOU.
The LCBO is the devil…
They have store brand beer and wine here. You can get a whole liter of Albert Heijn whatever for like, €3! And that’s the expensive grocery.
Clos du Bois Chardonnay with ice cubes is my aunt’s jam.
Hello, dearest niece. How ya been?
Wait, are you my cousin? My mom will pour a quarter glass of wine with ice cubes and just keep topping up the ice cubes all night until Homeopathic Wine is achieved.
This is the funniest thing I have ever read about wine. Homeopathic Wine achievement indeed.
My mom asks for ice cubes for her white wine in restaurants.
I do that too :/ I learnt it from my mom though…
Yellow Tail Shiraz is 100% my jam.
It’s my mom’s jam! This article is the truth.
I’m not even a mom! But still.
smoking loon is great, but I especially love the corks that read “woo woo woo woo woo woo woo COUGH woo woo woo woo” .
My mom actually does drink straight scotch (I’ll have to check on the breaking bottles with her teeth thing though). I once tried to convince her that I was bringing a bottle of this (horrifyingly branded) mom wine to her house for mother’s day dinner, but the force of her disapproval was so strong I broke down and admitted I was really bringing her Lagavulin.
My mom likes fruit flavored wines. She also used to mix white wine with cream soda, making some hideously sweet spritzer. She proudly shared this recipe with a Niagara winery rep at a wedding show. It was fun to watch a grown man die inside while recommending a wine to her for said recipe. My mom, drinking like a teenager.
white wine with cream soda
A few weeks ago I was at my parents’ house and saw that my dad’s giant plastic Taco Bell souvenir cup was filled with something that clearly was not his usual Cabernet Sauvignon mixed with Diet Coke. Turned out it was Chardonnay mixed with 7-Up. You know, warmer weather.
My father has passed away, but somewhere in the Great Beyond he is shaking his head and pouring himself another straight bourbon.
I mean, I guess it’s kind of like a kalimotxo, but you know, worse.
Misandrist hero.
As I read this, I realized with slowly dawning horror that my husband and I have become a Dad and a Mom, even though we neither have nor want kids.
My mom’s wine is vodka sodas. I can’t even think if I have ever seen her drink wine.
Both my parents didn’t drink much at dinner but after they sent us upstairs to bed they would break out the Gallo sherry because that’s what they drank in grad school. (And my dad would eat a bowl of Cheerios, and my mother would pretend that was an actual thing that humans can do.)
My mom can’t really drink because she gets terrible hangovers, but every year when we go camping she gets a bottle of wine that she drinks over the course of the week. She always gets Australian wines because, “they all have screw-tops!” which, IS THIS TRUE, AUSTRALIA
I am pretty sure they are screw-tops because they are Yellowtail but also you can’t argue with your mom about wine.
This was hours ago but yes, most wines in Australia are screw tops now! Some of them still do corks, but the vast majority are screw tops. I was mighty suspicious at first, but hey, now I don’t have to worry about finding a bottle opener! In theory, it’s actually better for preserving the wine for it to be a screw top.
AMAZING! I was not one to put my mom as an expert since she is not a drinker at ALL but I am so glad she was right! because of how she is my mom and I love when she is right. I’ll make sure to bring a bottle of Australian wine when we go camping in a couple of weeks, and I promise to never doubt my mom again.
Do you have any Australian wine recommendations? If they have corks that is okay, my boyfriend’s dad gave me a corkscrew for Christmas last year!
oh wow, so many wines, so little time! I’m from South Australia, and am firmly of the opinion that all South Australian wine is vastly superior to all other Australian wine*
We have really big gusty red wines, any shiraz from the Barossa Valley will be great, and any riesling from the Clare Valley/Eden Valley will also be great. Wines from McLaren Vale are also excellent, both red and white.
My all time favourite winery is Rockfords, in the Barossa. They do fantasic riesling and also their reds (cab sav and shiraz) are so, so good. Wirra Wirra Church Block red is great, other wineries to look out for are Pertaringa (red), Coriole (everything!), Langmeil (amazing red and rose, plus I got married there!), D’arenberg, Hamilton’s, Leo Buring for riesling, Schild Estate, Whilster Wines, Penny’s Hill…oh god there are too many! You’ll have to come visit instead 🙂 I have no idea really what gets exported, or if you can order stuff online?
*may or may not be true, but I’ll never admit otherwise!
My mom kept a bottle of vodka in the freezer. She would have scoffed at wine. Maybe she was James Bond?.
My dad recently bought my mom a bottle of wine (Barefoot, sweet white), proving that even DADs know about Mom Wine.
(Dad Magazine article idea: “Keeping your wife and your wallet happy: Wines under $5!”)
My dad is a boxed wine enthusiast – his advice for dealing with snooty liquor store employees who want to have a hard-sell conversation about your wine needs: “Head straight for the boxed wine aisle and they’ll leave you alone”
My mom never drank mom wines b/c she had health issues that made wine touchy for her at best, but there must be some level of instinct operating here, because even without formal instruction in mom wines I started drinking the right ones!
(I am not, in fact, a mom. But I have consumed nearly all of these.)
Every book club I’ve ever been in would have been improved by a gallon jug of cheap wine.
This perfectly describes my mom but replace all of the wines with ANGRY ORCHARD HARD CIDER
This has been our go-to summer drink this year. It’s like soda for grown-ups, so you can have it at lunchtime or two in the afternoon.
My mom always has a case of $17 rose prosecco at her house ready for drinking, which is delicious and makes for horrible hangovers. I guess this means she’s close but no cigar in the mom-wine camp.
My first adult-condoned alcoholic beverage was franzia and minute maid OJ in a 70’s orange plastic coffee mug from my best friend’s mom. This was presented as “Sangria.”
My mom is so committed to Carlo Rossi that she insisted I include it in the bar at my wedding.
Your mother is a hero.
So my older brother critiqued my parents’ wine selection once:
“Did you buy this in the Wino wines section? Did you buy this in the ‘I’ll just sleep here’ section?
Got to be Clos du Bois zinfandel. Because I’m a Classy Mom, dammit.
OMG I am a mom! Okay, well, obviously, we have two kids. But yes the grownups here drink a lot of merlot and malbec and I think we have had that yellow tail shiraz. 🙂
Also we are totally confused about the Clos du Bois, I am pretty sure we have bottles of actual Norman cider (like made in Normandy) under that label? But they are a California winery? What? We are out of town for the 4th so I cannot just go into our daughter’s house (aka the pantry — it used to be the phone closet ages ago, we know this because it has a sign that says ‘phone closet’ over it, and it has a door that closes, so when we moved into the house our daughter decided that the pantry was HER house) and look.
Growing up my mom drank Riunite (on ice…that’s nice), but in the years since has graduated to eiswein.
Ooh, eiswein. I love it!
Also this and the Dad articles really make me aware that even though nobody here really thinks of themselves as ‘old enough to be parents’ (because, you know, parents are in their 50s and 60s, like OUR parents), clearly we are squarely in a demographic. Which is kind of scary!
My father has passed away, but somewhere in the Great Beyond he is shaking his head and pouring himself another straight bourbon.
This has been our go-to summer drink this year. It's like soda for grown-ups, so you can have it at lunchtime or two in the afternoon.
oh wow, so many wines, so little time! I'm from South Australia, and am firmly of the opinion that all South Australian wine is vastly superior to all other Australian wine*
We have really big gusty red wines, any shiraz from the Barossa Valley will be great, and any riesling from the Clare Valley/Eden Valley will also be great. Wines from McLaren Vale are also excellent, both red and white.
My all time favourite winery is Rockfords, in the Barossa. They do fantasic riesling and also their reds (cab sav and shiraz) are so, so good. Wirra Wirra Church Block red is great, other wineries to look out for are Pertaringa (red), Coriole (everything!), Langmeil (amazing red and rose, plus I got married there!), D'arenberg, Hamilton's, Leo Buring for riesling, Schild Estate, Whilster Wines, Penny's Hill…oh god there are too many! You'll have to come visit instead 🙂 I have no idea really what gets exported, or if you can order stuff online?
*may or may not be true, but I'll never admit otherwise!
There is a retired physics prof at my church who is ALL ABOUT the prosecco at church brunches/altar guild meetings/every occasion. I'd never heard of it before he brought it to some occasion, so now I think of prosecco as a sciency dude wine. It's good stuff!
SHERRY!
The many times my mum and I used to go over to the house of a family friend and drink sherry… ah, those were the (underage drinking) days!
What’s ironic is that now that I actually am a mum, I never drink. Pregnancies and breastfeeding meant that for ages I just didn’t, and then we were too poor even for the cheap stuff, and now I’m out of practice. The Handsome Sidekick and I bought champagne to celebrate when we sold our house and I drank about 1/4 cup and then woke up in the middle of the night with a hangover. Sheesh.
SHERRY!
The many times my mum and I used to go over to the house of a family friend and drink sherry… ah, those were the (underage drinking) days!
What's ironic is that now that I actually am a mum, I never drink. Pregnancies and breastfeeding meant that for ages I just didn't, and then we were too poor even for the cheap stuff, and now I'm out of practice. The Handsome Sidekick and I bought champagne to celebrate when we sold our house and I drank about 1/4 cup and then woke up in the middle of the night with a hangover. Sheesh.
Ooh, eiswein. I love it!
I showed this piece to my mom, who I consider to be an expert on mom wines (she watches Jeopardy and drinks Chardonnay almost every night, and has gotten into the contestant pool twice for that show, so the lesson here is drink more mom wine) and her response: “Well, I do enjoy a good Yellow Tail whilst watching Jeopardy. But they clearly didn’t consult me before writing this because there is no mention of box wine.” Which I have to agree with, box wines are the real party beverage for moms.
My local Trader Joe’s currently carries a just-under-$5 2012 TJ-brand Coastal Syrah. It’s lovely. I’ve been drinking the heck out of it.