Nina Dobrev and Julianne Hough's Fresh Vine Wine
Yes, I am a mother! Yes, I am a businesswoman! Yes, that business is an Etsy shop where I sell knitted caps for babies with dented heads!
This week I am trying Julianne Hough and Nina Dobrev’s Fresh Vine Cabernet Sauvignon from 2020 ($21.99 at Giannone Wines).
It’s baby’s first red wine of the Substack!
Julianne Hough — most famous for being on Dancing With the Stars (as the not-star) — teamed up with her BFF Nina Dobrev — of Vampire Diaries fame — to create a low-calorie, low-carb, low-sugar, guilt-free line of wines. In addition to the Cabernet, they offer a rosé, a chardonnay and a pinot noir.
Guilt-free wine is the logical conclusion of female empowerment and body shame. Let’s dive in!
The first thing I notice about these women is that they have a lot of hair. In interviews together, they practically fill the screen with competing wavy curls and lowlights. But the culture of ‘having a lot of hair’ is the wine’s core audience. Women who have a lot of hair: it’s their brand. In photos, Julianne and Nina’s hair looks thick and healthy. It’s a little glam, a little cottage core, a little lesbian. It’s aspirational. May we all be blessed with a top knot exploding out of our scrunchy.
Which is why I was surprised to see the Fresh Vine website’s store locator direct me to Pebble Bar. For those unfamiliar, Pebble Bar is a swanky new bar in Midtown partly-owned by Pete Davidson and Cousin Greg. It’s the type of place populated by NBC executives and influencers with 17,000 followers. Where wine pours start at $21. Not where one finds low-calorie celebrity wines. But maybe it was that good.
I attempted contact on a Monday with my friend Delaney. The bar was loud, but, like, in a cool way. I was intimidated. “Excuse me, do you have Fresh Vine wine?”
Look, there was no sexy way of asking. There are multiple problems here. The internal rhyme scheme. The obviousness of a ‘fresh vine.’
The 2012-looking-ass hipster in a denim apron stared at me as if I had just stuck a knife through his eyes. I settled for a martini and sat down.
I don’t know why the wine locator would lie to me. Who can you trust anymore? Delaney and I talked about our favorite candy flavors for a while and then left, dejected.
But without any other leads, I renewed my faith in wine locators and ended up at a store in New Jersey. The things I do for my followers (my mother and the people she sends this to).
Finally I had a taste. It was not good. I mean, I’m not the type to spring for a big Cabernet. But the guilt-free nature of the wine destroyed any of the flavor. There’s none of the typical spice you’d expect from the varietal; it’s just pretty flat. It lacked any tannins or acid. I had no desire for another glass.
Unless it’s not the wine. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I'm not a Fresh Vine girl.
There are pictures of salads everywhere on the Fresh Vine website. The ‘guilt-free’ quality of this wine has the same ethos as Halo Top, or of all those alternative grain chips I eat from Whole Foods. They even market Fresh Vine’s calories by the bottle. Thank god: now you can finally black out and not feel bad about it, because the problem with drinking a bottle of wine is all those calories.
But instead of shoveling it down over your fridge at 3 AM, Fresh Vine stresses the importance of “experience.”
The founders bring up the word constantly in interviews. Nina often messes up the copy when discussing the wine. For example, on an episode of the Drew Barrymore Show from May of 2021, Nina says “There was a gap in the market, um, for like wine with experiences.”
Julianne, as George from Of Mice and Men, quickly cuts in: “I think what Nina meant to say was ‘nothing says let’s talk and create experiences, whether we’re going to laugh or we’re going to cry, but we’re probably going to have a glass of wine in our hand when we do that.”
As stupid and abstract as a wine “experience” is, it gets to a larger trend: the experience economy, a term first coined in 1998 by two economists to explain the new era of market transactions succeeding the industrial economy and even the service economy. It’s a sort of postmodern term that focuses on a good’s experiential quality. We see it everywhere: museums of ice cream, immersive Van Gogh exhibits. The very ‘experience’ of celebrity wine is often just the value-added of a name.
This is especially the case for a diet wine like Fresh Vine, marketed ostensibly for suburban drunk mothers who want to be thin. Here, experience means transformation:
Food as salvation, rather than as a dieting tool, is a product of the experience economy. Gone are the cottage cheese and grapefruit regimens. Now, the emphasis is on eating ‘clean’: of healing the heart alongside the body. Julianne is the pinnacle of this fad. She begins every morning — as she shared in an Elle video diary — with thirty quick arm motions that can only be described as an exorcism (I BEG you watch the first 45 seconds to see what I mean). What these frenetic motions do to the body, I would guess, is negligible. But it’s about the experience.
There is a ritualistic existence to this lifestyle, which Fresh Vine seems to fit into. While you may never be as regimented as Julianne Hough, this wine is a way of trying. And what do you end up with? At the very least, thin alcoholism.
If two best friends could make a wine this bad, maybe they weren't best friends after all?
In doing my research for this, I watched a lot of interviews with Julianne and Nina. The internet keeps trying to tell me they’re actually friends, but I don’t buy it. As Julianne explained on that episode of the Drew Barrymore Show from last year, “One of those common interests was that we really enjoyed laughing, spending time together, and sharing a glass of wine.”
I mean, does that not sound so sus?
We have shared interests. Such as: laughing.
Maybe there is an underbelly to guilt-free wine. Maybe the ‘experience’ of this wine is fake? Of course you’ll fall short of the etherial lives Julianne and Nina purport to lead: they don’t lead them themselves.
But it’s also more than that. I’m spitballing here: there is a yonic tension between the two women. Their love and hatred for one another comes from the same place, wrapped in a simultaneous desire and repulsion. I don’t think they kiss, but I think their relationship is explicitly psycho-sexual. Julianne gives and withholds love from Nina.
I have come to see their relationship as a real life version of Jennifer’s Body (yes, Diablo and I both named our projects after Hole songs). Julianne Hough is the Megan Fox bisexual demon-spawn and Nina Dobrev is the best friend who is hot but has glasses.
My hypothesis: they have sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame and clean eating. And Fresh Vine wine is the only way they can free themselves.
That Elle ‘Get Ready With Me’ video with Julianne Hough gets a bit revealing as it goes on:
Julianne walks downstairs to her open kitchen and takes her daily multivitamin filled with the blood from twelve virgins, sacrificial lamb hearts and Zinc. She turns her head 180 degrees to reveal Nina Dobrev chained to a cloud couch sectional.
“Nina, we must sell 666 cases of low-calorie wine before Papa allows us to stop sharing experiences together.” I took me a few times to understand what she was saying because she was speaking in reverse.
“Yes, lord!” Nina responds, surrounded by a thousand dead PR girls taking golden hour pictures of rosés for the Instagram grid.
Julianne’s eyes roll back in her head and then sinks into the netherworld. She has Zumba class.
omg did i tell you i accidentally went to pebble bar a few weeks ago? 🥴 an accident!! i swear!