Goon wine

Goon!

One of the most important things I discovered on my trip to Australia is goon.

What is Goon?

Goon is a 4 litre boxed wine and extremely cheap- it costs around 9 to 15 Australian dollars for the entire carton. You’ll see it everywhere you go; forget Ayers Rock, forget the Kangaroo, forget Kylie’s backside, goon is in my opinion the national emblem of Australia.

The great thing about it is it has two uses:

1. It gets you drunk

2. Once you’re drunk you can use it as a pillow to rest your weary head.

May contain fish and egg products…

Goon is perhaps the most disgusting wine you’ll ever taste, and suspiciously says on the box ‘may contain fish and egg products’. One question I want answering is: how the hell do you get fish and eggs in wine? And what kind of fish? I can just imagine someone at a wine tasting table, uttering “Hmmm…yes….well I can sense an aroma of tuna in this one.” Apparently it’s something to do with the refining process, and I would love to go on a goon wine tour to find out how they make it.

Don’t go for the red…

Another piece of advice- only buy the ‘soft fruity lexia’ and NEVER buy the red goon. You see, goon should only be drunk in one way, and that’s by taking the bag out of the box, lying on your back and somebody feeding you goon shots. And red goon is going to stain. Everywhere you go in Oz you’ll see people with a bag of goon in their hand.

Goon Games

Even better is the number of games you can play with it; you can play Goon of Fortune where you hang the bag from a rotating washing line and whoever it lands on has to drink. Then there’s a game you can play with the box, where each player pick the box up off the ground using only their mouth. You keep ripping strips off the box to make it lower to the ground, and keep playing until everyone’s out.

My first encounter with goon was when I was staying at Surfside hostel on Bondi Beach and I had many a fun time kicking the bag around in a game of goon football.

It’s the best piece of advice I can give you for Australia because buying goon will save you a hell of a lot of money!

5 thoughts on “Goon!”

  1. When I was travelling in Aus a couple of mates and I invented a game called ‘Wobbly Catch’; it had something of Goon of Fortune about it. Players would sit on a playground roundabout and it would be spun to maximum fastness (this part I would insist on). Players would take it in turns to drink, then hurl the bag at other players. Due to the movement of the roundabout and the increasing level of drunkenness, the game became very messy, very quickly. There was something amazing about the strange trajectories the goon bag would take when flung, often resulting in hilarious, high speed face-to-bag contact. Give it a whirl, it’s a bizarre game with no winners.

  2. The eggs come from clarifying the wine, they are used in expensive wine aswell (google wine finning) and the fish is from something called Isinglass (also used to clarify wine!).
    Love the goon 🙂

  3. Yep, was gonna say both are also found in expensive wines. The role is to get the proteins and yeast to clump up and fall to the bottom of the container to give it a clearer complexion, There is a vegetarian alternative , Irish Moss (Its made from seaweed), but frankly I’m a fan of just letting your beverage be cloudy. Protein=flavor.

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