Château Taurine Since 2018
Story
Everybody who knows me knows I’m the Red Bull guy. Since 2018 I’ve reviewed every new flavor and ranked all of them. Now each review gets pros and cons, a final review and a score out of 10 on my Instagram stories, and my friends text me before they pick one.
The first vintage
When I started driving, I got a job at Eagle Point, a ski resort outside Beaver, Utah, and they gave me the lodge’s old Red Bull mini fridge because they knew I liked Red Bull. From there it kind of became my personality. Everybody at school knew I was the kid who drank Red Bull and reviewed it, and every year when the new flavors came out, I got them. I lined the headliner of my car with the tabs, and whenever a gas station had a two for five, somebody told me. Me and my friends started getting normal slushies at 7-Eleven and mixing Red Bull into them, and we still do.
The non-alcoholic pairing
Freshman year of college, one of my roommates was a Red Bull Wings ambassador who didn’t even like the stuff. It was just his job, so he gave me free access to his cooler, and I probably promoted Red Bull more than he did.
I didn’t drink then, and I still don’t. So when everybody else was doing drinking tricks with shots, beers and shooters, I did all of it with Red Bull. At a party, instead of offering me a couple of cans of beer, somebody always had a cold Red Bull ready for me. I’d chug one with my friends or play the drinking games with it, and everybody knew I was the kid who doesn’t drink but will still hang out, just with a Red Bull in hand.
Tasting notes
Somewhere in there I started ranking them, and the reviews got big and drawn out. Each one gets pros and cons, a final review and a score out of 10, and I compare the flavors to songs and feelings and environments. The 2024 winter edition was “mid with hints of sadness and notes of a melted piña colada snow cone.” It got a 3. Fuji apple and ginger was “the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald, but in drink form,” so the Gordon Lightfoot song plays under that review.
Chef’s choice
A 10 has to be perfect in my eyes. Everything under that is vibes: whether I could drink it on a regular basis and what I can compare it to. Coconut and peach are tied at the top with a 10. Sudachi lime is right behind them at 9.3. Long live sudachi, whoever he is. Grapefruit and blossom, a 9.2, tastes like what I imagine skydiving in the ’70s would feel like. White peach, a 9.1: if it was a car, it’d be Ramone from Cars. At the bottom, watermelon got a 2, and beach breeze got a zero.
Ask the sommelier
Now I’m kind of my friends’ go-to consultant. They text me when they find a flavor in the wild and ask which one they should get, and some of them turn on notifications so they get the review when it drops.
Being the consultant makes me feel like I truly am a sommelier. You pull up to a restaurant and ask what pairs well. It’s always funny when people ask me about Red Bull flavors, because it’s like, “Oh yes, bow before me on my throne, and I’ll tell you what flavor you should pick depending on what you’re thinking about.”
Rare finds
Whenever there’s a new flavor, I go on an adventure trying to track it down. It’s always random gas stations, and basically putting out a wanted poster for somebody to find one. When the pink edition came out, I offered a reward to anyone in Utah County who could find me one. A friend found one in the UK, and I’ve tracked down a couple of flavors that were discontinued in the US but still around in the UK. Then my friends were begging me to tell them where I found them.
The cellar
I probably have close to 100 cans now. I think the oldest are the original peach, the OG grapefruit, the purple açaí and an old winter spiced pear. When a seasonal flavor I like is about to be discontinued, I buy a bunch and keep them. When they go flat, I recarbonate them with a SodaStream, so I have flavors Red Bull doesn’t make anymore that I can keep coming back to. (The flats of Monster in the cart and the car were for my friend’s birthday.)
From the self-proclaimed Red Bull sommelier