The reverse Jesus: let's turn wine into water

take THAT, son of god

Hello, clowns!

This week, I’m chillaxin’ with my favorite kitchen inspiration, and that’s my man Jesus. He’s hilarious. Also, when’s the last time you actually heard someone use the words “chillaxing and the name “Jesus” in the same sentence? I am chock full of surprises.

Yesterday, Davida and I were wandering around Target, looking for dumb children’s toys to sully on the newsletter, when we stumbled upon a wall full of filtered water pitchers. At home, we have a Brita pitcher and use it constantly. It’s pretty handy and has the added mental placebo effect of convincing us that we’re not just drinking sewer water full of microscopic poopoo and peepee particles.

One of the pitchers on the wall was by a brand called ZeroWater. This water filter purports to be one of the strongest ones on the market, “removing 99.6% of dissolved solids” (so, delicious poo) according to its website. I remember seeing late night commercials for this thing, where they’d pour a little food coloring into some water and suddenly after they ran it through the pitcher, it would be clear again. Wow, guys, can you believe it?!

As we were standing there admiring the packaging, Davida briefly disappeared mentally into some kind of cavern in her mind. I’m not entirely sure where she went, but when she returned from her harrowing journey, she looked at the ZeroWater pitcher and said three words: “The Reverse Jesus.”

Then she turned to me and said, “Let’s put wine in this thing and see if we can turn it back into water!”

I’ve always wanted to try wrecking one of these water pitchers, so this was a perfect reason to do it. Plus, this would allow me to continue to do blasphemous things in the name of the son of God. The world’s gone to shit, anyway, might as well try to rile up the J-Man himself.

We needed a base wine to turn back into water for this experiment, so I asked Davida what we should get.

“How about that stuff that comes in the huge jug? That’s the kind that gives you a bad hangover,” she said.

Ah yes, the wine produced by my old friend, Carlos Rossi. It’s clear Carlos is in the wrong profession, because his brand of wine is some of the absolute crappiest that you can get. I remember that the first time I had it, I was in college. It tasted like vinegar and I immediately felt sick. It was awesome. So we got the worst-looking variety, which was called “Sweet Red.”

Check out how big the actual filter is for the pitcher.

I actually laughed when I saw it. I thought Ashton Kutcher was going to jump out of the top to tell me I was Punk’d. Wow, Ashton, you really got me, and so specifically!

Davida and I tried the wine right out of the jug and decided it was pretty gross.

It was extremely sweet and about as stomach-turning as I remembered. I knew that if I drank more than a little bit, I would probably wake up in some ditch in the middle of Nebraska missing a couple teeth or something, which is exactly what happened last weekend.

I had my beautiful assistant Davida load the pitcher up with some of Carlos’ premium mayhem juice.

The first trickle looked strangely clear, and I thought, holy shit, this might actually be working!

But when the reservoir filled up, turned out the wine hadn’t lost much color, if at all.

I 100% realize that lots of people have run stuff like wine, various types of alcohol, and Mountain Dew through one of these things before. Probably even actual pee. Trying this isn’t particularly novel, but I bet nobody has done it in Jesus’ name. It was time someone finally filtered the sin out of Carlos Rossi, and the right person for the job was me.

I poured some of the filtered Carlos Rossi into another glass cup and compared it to the control, which is the little glass on the left.

Its appearance wasn’t appreciably different, but when I took my first sip, I was pretty shocked. A lot of the sweetness was stripped out, and the wine had taken on somewhat of a sickly medicinal note, which is exactly what I look for in a fine vintage of Carlos Rossi.

I took the wine and ran it completely back through the ZeroWater filter again.

It looked about the same, and we tried another taste test. This time, Davida insisted it tasted sweeter than the control, but I thought it tasted boozier for some reason. After our third try, we agreed that it was starting to taste more watery.

After lining them up, I didn’t see much of a difference in color in any of them, which was semi-disappointing.

Then I said “Fuck it, I’m going to run the same batch through 10 times.”

After the 10th run, I motioned for Davida to come back over and try some.

She said, “How does it manage to keep getting a new flavor? I feel like it has a different taste now. Like, it’s more drinkable.”

It definitely had changed quite a bit, but after 10 filter sessions, the flavor hadn’t evolved much further, and its color hadn’t changed significantly. I felt a little dejected, because I’d at least hoped the wine would have tasted holy or some shit, but it didn’t. What a bummer. Eventually I dumped all the glasses and started to clean up my mess, including the brand-new ZeroWater pitcher.

I decided to run some water through it to flush out the filter, and salvage it for future use, when I saw something astonishing happen.

The perfectly clear water I’d run through the top of the pitcher came out with a slight pleasant-looking blush to it.

Could it be? Did I just perform a miracle?

I took a sip and realized that the water I’d run through the filter now tasted like wine.

It’s a goddamn miracle. You can all start calling me Jesus from now on, clowns. I still prefer Dannis, though.

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I have to figure out what to do with the rest of this awful wine, and I’ll report what I did with it later this week to paid subscribers. Recommendations are definitely welcomed, so send them my way.

As always, I love you all, my children, and don’t forget to shove a submarine sandwich up your ass in honor of your new lord and savior, Dannis Ree Christ.