Chrissy Metz's Joyful Heart Wine Co.
Approved by the Lord and Facebook conspiracy moms everywhere
This week I am trying Chrissy Metz’s Joyful Heart Wine Co. red and white blends ($16 each on her website).
It must be difficult to be Chrissy Metz. Her fans are all seemingly recovering from nervous breakdowns in out-patient facilities. They may not like their bodies, or their children, and Chrissy is their inspiration for self-love. Imagine how scary it is to be inspirational. Her self-help/memoir, This is Me: Loving the Person You Are Today, is essentially a big “zont zo it” to her fans (as well as a vehicle to brag about how she once met Oprah).
Take one line from the book: “When you put one foot in front of the other, you cannot fail.” This implies that the people she is writing towards are currently not putting one foot in front of the other. What I gather is that her fans are constantly on the brink of destruction.
But women on the edge need wine, too. In walks Joyful Heart Wine Co.
Chrissy Metz, best known for the long-running NBC drama This Is Us, founded this wine company in 2021 in collaboration with the winemaker Nicole Walsh. As Chrissy writes on the company’s website, “From the first miracle to today, wine has always played a part in the familiar rituals that help us connect our everyday actions and the divine.”
Yep, as in THAT first miracle. It’s a Christian wine. Which is important!! You don’t want infidels making your zinfandels (that line got me a writing job on Sex and The City in 1999).
But it’s not Christian in a Blood-of-Christ kind of way. More of a wine for God-fearing mothers to drink after they drop their kid off at school at 8 AM.
Watching meet-and-greets with Chrissy is really crazy. Middle-aged women in nap dresses greet her like moths to a Bath and Body Works winter candy apple candle: “Of course we can take a photo, I’m just a normal girl!” she’ll say. And truly, she is so normal. She and Kelly Clarkson often have competitions to see who is more normal. They show each other pictures of their golden doodles who are the baddest boys but we love them.
Most fervent TV fanbases are found in sci-fi realms or on Bravo. But This Is Us, which perfected the “good cry,” might be the last primetime drama to have such deep participation from its viewers. If you watch This is Us, people know you watch This is Us.
I had never seen the show but I watched the pilot this week for research. The first thing you hear is a Sufjan Stevens song, and I immediately felt a knot in my throat. I do not know why. But I was worried if I didn’t stop right there, I would become someone who calls my friends “girlfriends.” This is Us goes sicko-mode over its 6-season run (which just concluded this year) and if anyone has seen the final season, when Mandy Moore gets Alzheimers, please definitely reach out about what that was like.
Chrissy’s body of work post-This Is Us has become very religious. But not necessarily in a fundamentalist way. In just like a Jars of Clay way.
Chrissy starred in the 2019 movie Breakthrough, about a family who finds the power of God after their teenage son falls in an icy lake and goes into a coma. She released an awful song in 2020 called “Talking To God” and will be releasing a children’s book in 2023 called “’When I Talk to God, I Talk About You.”
But she’s not so Candace Cameron about it. She still has fun. She still gets divorced from freelance copywriters. She doesn’t even have a proverb in her Instagram bio.
She’s, perhaps, an Etsy Christian. She’s about as religious as a girl who has a trashy tattoo of a cross, or an infinity sign, on her wrist. She reminds me of Adrienne Bailon, whose movie I'm in Love with a Church Girl was “executive produced by God,” as the credits state.
And this ethos pervades Chrissy’s wine. As she says aptly: “It’s only after we fill our own glasses that we’re able to pour unto others.” Amen.
So how was this Christian wine, you ask? Honestly, not bad. The white wine was an innocuous, floral Sauvignon Blanc you wouldn’t be mad about drinking. The red was a particular highlight, and perhaps the best attempt at a big-bodied Cabernet I’ve had in my celebrity wine venture. It was pepper-y and spicy but still had a nice freshness. It’s as good as a $25 bottle of wine.
And at $16, it’s a deal. I could absolutely see myself creating a mid-day wine habit that turns into a six-month spiral where I stash Joyful Heart Wine co. in places my good-for-nothing husband can’t find and then neglect my four children. XOXO!!!