What a relief, then, for the booming bonnet industry that the Sofia Mini is out there. Maybe you've seen them, the hot-pink hexagonal little cases that hold four equally hot-pink cans of wine? And maybe when you've seen them, you've thought to yourself, "Twenty dollars for four little cans!? Are you fricking kidding me? I can get an entire case of Two-Buck Chuck for that price."
But you won't be as stylish holding a bottle of Chuck in your hand, because the Sofia Mini is all the rage with the Sex and the City crowd, and you, hot twentysomething lassie, are the target audience. And you won't get to enjoy the ingenious packaging, complete with a state-of-the-art bendy straw.
Sofia Mini is made by the Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery of Napa Valley, California. The Coppola, of course, is Francis Ford, who named the wine after his daughter, Lost in Translation director Sofia. The cans are about Pimp Juice-size and contain 187 milliliters of sparkling white wine, which in Sofia Mini's case is a blend of predominantly pinot blanc grapes, with a touch of sauvignon blanc and muscat tossed in for good measure.
You, with money to burn and style points to score, will no doubt find many things to enjoy when drinking what Gawker.com has so accurately dubbed "a can of dumb-ass." Pull the straw off the side of the can, unwrap it, and yank on one end to extend it as far as it goes. Lick your luscious lips, pop the can, gaze around the club to see if the hunks are paying attention, and commence to sucking. What arrives in your mouth is bubbly, of course, and drier than one would expect from a beverage designed to cater to the unsophisticated-but-yearning-to-be set. Sofia's actually pretty good, although it's kind of hard to tell because it comes in an aluminum can. Because of this, the wine's qualities -- its nose, its color and even its taste -- are buried in the can, which is unfortunate. But you're not drinking Sofia for the wine; you're drinking it for the fashion -- so who cares?
At this point you can get Sofia Mini at a lot of markets. Its test run of 5,000 cases quickly sold out, and the winery projects that it'll sell 10 times that amount this year. The price is the same everywhere, but we got ours at World Market in Brentwood. World Market, if you haven't been there, is a pretty cool place that sells furniture, wine, candy and, joy of joys, Hob-Nobs (British chocolate cookies that we used to have to drive to Lebanon, Illinois, to buy). But it doesn't really matter where you buy Sofia Mini. The most important thing is that you're seen with one in your hand.
