Pairing Bum Wines With MREs

By Melissa McEwen in Food on Dec 16, 2014 8:00PM

Photo by Dennis Lee

The year is 2024, it's been five years since nuclear war wiped out most of the infrastructure in the United States. Bands of humans subsist mainly on packaged foods like MREs. Oh and wine, since wine bottles are a package. But a cyborg version of Rahm Emanuel living in a tower by the lake is hoarding all the good wine, so average people are forced to drink bum wines. It's only this kind of story that would explain why food writer Dennis Lee and our wine writer John Lenart decided to pair these things together. But indeed they did. The unsophisticated flavors of Juicy Juice present in such vintages as 2 Buck Chuck pair surprisingly well with the various types of chewy meats found in the MREs.

Beef sandwiches with a shelf life of over two years sounds like a mistake. But after one bite, it made perfect sense: The beef is dehydrated, with the texture of beef jerky (makes sense, since Bridgford makes beef jerky). It tastes less like barbecue sauce and more like Sloppy Joe sauce. It’s not particularly moist, but that’s a good thing, since the sandwiches aren’t soggy. Think of it as a Sloppy Joe jerky toaster pastry. The bread tastes like an entire loaf of Wonderbread that got sat on by an elephant. It’s very dense.

The wine, commonly known to most people as Trader Joe’s $2 Buck Chuck (now $3 Buck Chuck), is also a perfect pairing. It’s light bodied, fruity, and juicy, which helps rehydrate every bite of the relatively dry sandwich. Overall, I’d be content munching on this in the wilderness of my city apartment if I was out of actual food, drunk off Chuck, and naked.

Read their full pairings over at The Pizzle.