Stephen Amell's Nocking Point x "Outside" by Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis
I have met the devil and his name is Stephen Amell
It’s a special 3-for-1 on the ‘stack.
Today I am trying Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’s “Outside Wine,” created for Stephen Amell’s Nocking Point wine brand. It’s a Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah blend ($31 on the company’s website).
I first heard about this wine a few months ago when Ashton Kutcher hosted a Peloton treadmill class with Kim Kardashian, for some reason. I did not actually take the class — because I’m sick of the WOKE MOB coming for the brand after a single baby got stuck under their treadmill — but I was curious as to what the two might discuss. Not much, it turns out, except Ashton’s new wine.
In doing research, I realized this wine was a collab between the Kunis-Kutcher clan and Nocking Point, Stephen Amell’s wine label based in Walla Walla, Washington.
For those unfamiliar, Stephen Amell is the star of the CW show Arrow, which ended after 8 seasons in 2020. I have never seen Arrow, which I thank God for every day. I think it’s about a superhero who is also an archer. It never was all that popular but its ravenous fanbase will continue to produce smutty fan fiction until the world ends.
Nocking Point has been around since 2012, when Stephen co-founded the brand with his friend Andrew Harding, an executive at MTV. The story of how Stephen Amell got into wine is soooooo boring and involves the Toronto Blue Jays but also Paso Robles. I won’t subject you to that Abu Ghraib-level of torture.
But what’s important to know is that the company was founded as a wine membership club. They don’t make wine, per se, but hire winemakers to create custom blends for Nocking Point to then brand. Each monthly subscription box includes wine bottles and products from, like, dope friends who are doing amazing things with beans.
This is the thing: Stephen Amell, and by extension Nocking Point, is the physical embodiment of an axe-throwing bar. He’s a microbrewery and indoor rock climbing gym and Scotch and Soda outlet rolled into one thick-necked Canadian.
And this justifies the existence of Nocking Point: they just want to make wine for dudes (and guy’s-girls!). Pardon my French, but hell yeah. For example, the label of their Apex rosé reads: ‘pink wine for dudes.’ Making wine for dudes just means saying it’s wine for dudes, I think.
To drive this point home, Stephen and Andrew produced a 36-minute pilot in 2016 called “Dudes Being Dudes in Wine Country.”
This made me so sad to watch :(. Men have to justify drinking wine by filming half-hour pilots about it. I was struck by how little Stephen knew about wine despite owning his own brand. By the end of the video, the two dudes give a glass of Nocking Point to a bearded winemaker. He takes a sip and pauses: “one thing I like about merlot is that they don’t have to be perfect.”
Lol.
In a really skeptical New York Times profile of the company from 2016, Stephen said that “Nocking Point really is a technology company. We have an infinitely scalable online e-commerce platform.”
This comment forced the government of Italy to invest in a nuclear weapons program that will reach Walla Walla by 2030.
What a “wine technology” company means, I guess, is that it sells NFTs.
It also means that Nocking Point gets many minor celebrities to give their name to the brand. Aisha Tyler “lent her genius” to a Malbec blend in 2018, while the basketballer Desmond Mason created the “Evoltra” grenache blend last year (apparently this spells “Art Love” backwards … which ... go piss girl!).
Outside Wine is Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’s second collaboration with Nocking Point, the first being their “Quarantine Wine” pinot noir released in April 2020. Who has two thumbs and is not putting on hard pants today xD! The timing of this wine’s release makes me think Ashton knew something we did not.
But the promotional video for the wine is kind of endearing. Mila and Ashton talk over each other in a cute, couple-y way. I know their whole thing is being cheesily relatable, but it’s maybe also sweet. Ashton is kind of like Stephen Amell in that he wears the most heathered v-neck t-shirts and loves his wife.
Given the first bottle’s success, which raised $1 million for COVID-response charities, Ashton and Mila came back with the Outside Wine last year.
I placed an order immediately after that Peloton class, and didn’t think about it until 2 weeks ago when it became the only thing I thought about.
By then, it had been almost 2 months without an update on my Nocking Point order. So much for ‘wine technology.’ My emails, calls, were never returned. So I did what any rational person would do: have a psychotic breakdown on Instagram.
The problem is, I do not really have an Instagram. My relationship with social media begins and ends at sometimes commenting “who is watching this in 2022?” on old YouTube videos. And as for Instagram, I simply had to take a stand against Russian disinformation campaigns. Kidding! But I really don’t have an account, except for a profile I made in the 6th grade that I now use to DM Serbian Eurovision contestants who were robbed in the semifinals.
I soon realized that this Instagram account, with zero posts, has a profile picture of my mother. I could lean into this: she was the Karen I could never be.
Copied-and-pasted on every post. I would not stop until I had Gone Girl-ed Stephen Amell. It was shortly after this I finally received a tracking number for the wine. The squeaky middle-aged white woman gets the oil.
It turns out, Ashton and Mila’s wine may not have been worth the wait after all. I opened the bottle with my friend Charlotte, who described it as “church wine.” It certainly registered on the Manischewitz scale, with its syrupy-viscous heft and unsubtle sweetness. The wine though did have some nice, bright red fruit notes and was pretty acidic. But it didn’t have much depth. Ultimately, it tasted like Jamba Juice.
To paraphrase a winemaker buddy, one thing I like about celebrity wines is that they don’t have to be perfect.