Jennifer Lopez's entry to the celebrity booze game is fancy, classic flavors that aren't essential in any way.
Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Earlier this week, I took a look at Cutwater — the high-alcohol canned cocktail designed for a mass market. Today, we’re going a level above; a bottled cocktail so fancy its press kit came with a cheese board set and luggage tag.
Delola is a relatively new foray into celebrity sponsored spirits, this one backed by Jennifer Lopez. While that may not appeal to me, a dirtbag from Rhode Island, quite like the Dunkin hard coffees of beau Ben Affleck, there’s a certain appeal here. Like Cutwater, Delola promises a properly boozy experience at between 10.5 and 11.5 alcohol by volume (ABV) in each bottle. It also promises a hard seltzer-esque calorie count, clocking in at roughly 110 per serving, though a serving is only five ounces.
My tasting kit came with two of Delola’s three flavors. Let’s see how Paloma Rosa and Bella Berry taste.
Cracking the bottle unleashes a torrent and fizz and strong aroma of fresh grapefruit. The first thing you get from the top sip, however, is tequila. It’s strong but not overpowering; there’s no boozy burn involved, which makes sense given its 11.5 percent ABV.
That tequila is washed away by a sweet, juicy finish. You can tell there’s real citrus involved here, not only from the solid grapefruit taste but the slight syrupy texture of the drink itself.
You won’t mistake it for a seltzer for a few reasons. It’s bubbly but not quite light. Delola is a little heavier even when discounting its higher-than-usual alcohol content.
It’s tasty, bringing back memories of homemade punches around holiday time. It’s slightly imperfect in a familiar way. Palomas aren’t my favorite cocktail, but this is a solid entry in an easily accessible bottle.
This spritz is a little lighter at 10.5 percent ABV and doesn’t betray that booze-load from the pour. Instead, this smells like melted popsicles. To which I say, hell yeah.
That doesn’t 100 percent hold true on first sip. There’s roughly a shot of vodka in each serving and you can tell. It’s not aggressive or harsh, it’s just sorta … vodka. There’s not much flavor to it and it knocks down the taste of the berries. The overall result is a muted cocktail that does its job but could be much better.
That’s the risk of pre-made cocktails; you lose the autonomy to mess with the ingredients. Delola’s Bella Berry tastes fine, but I’d rather either have a less boozy, better tasting drink or one that has a little more of a punch. That’s a weird thing to say about a drink that clocks in at 21 proof, but here we are.
This a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Delola’s spritzes over a cold can of Hamm’s?
There are two bottles of Delola currently sitting in my fridge, untouched since my taste test a couple months ago. I have no plans on giving it away, but I also haven’t seen it and said “hell yeah, I’ll have one of these with dinner.” It’s a fine and inessential drink whose main selling point is ease.
But the paloma would make a solid morning tailgate beverage, so there’s a chance it makes it out to a Brewers game this summer.
