One day I woke up and decided I was going to become healthier and try to sort out my horribly fatty diet. Cranberry juice was the first step. I figured that having a couple of glasses a day would be an easy way to get some nice nutrients inside me. Plus I am quite partial to vodka cranberry! There the healthy living went out the window. Anyway cranberry juice is contains high levels of organic acids that are supposed to help emulsify those fat cells and aids the cells in preventing bacteria from sticking to them (therefore aiding in unrinary infections). So being in France I looked around for a familiar product and that was where i found Ocean Spray Cranberry Classic.

The packaging is identical to the UK version, except obviously the nutritional information and description is in French. The splash of the Ocean Spray logo makes it look extremely refreshing and the juicy cranberries on the front make you want to rip open the carton there and then. The white colour also makes it look fresh and healthy and reminds me of sitting by the sea somewhere having a nice cold glass of the stuff, even though this is highly improbable as I would most probably be working my way through a cocktail...

On the packaging it tells me that it has no added colouring or presevatives. It also tells me that it is made from concentrated cranberry juice and only contains 25% percent fruit and that the rest is water, glucose syrup and fructose syrop with some sugar for good measure. Per 100ml there is actually 12g of sugar. That is not so good but similar to other brands. Maybe this added sugar is due to the bitterness of cranberries but with the sugar content already found in fruit I think I would have preferred no more to be added. Yet still this was definitely an improvement on my morning can of diet coke. It also tells me that it is naturally rich in antioxidants. At 49 calories per 100ml you have to be a bit careful with this because you may think it's just juice but if you have a few glasses of this a day you may soon be wondering why your diet isn't going so well after all. But this is the same with most juices as they contain high amounts of sugar.

So wit the nutritional stuff out of the way, what does it taste like? Well it is quite sweet and it does leave that aftertaste of tannin. However all cranberry juices leave this taste so if you don't enjoy it then you won't be drinking cranberry juice anyway! You can definitely taste the sugar but it slides down easily just the same. When served really cold straight from the fridge it is lovely and hard to stop yourself from drinking the entire carton. However I find that the tannin residue enables me to avoid this as it dries your mouth out a bit unlike if you had a mango juice or something similar, which I would find mightly difficult to resist. I have added water to this juice as a squash substitute, as I can't find any in France and it seems to do the job as well as reducing calories and increasing my water intake (and helping my purse as i don't go through the carton so quickly!).

In all I would buy this again but I would be interested to compare the sugar content to other brands that are a little cheaper. It was very enjoyable but the sweetness put me off as one of the reasons I enjoy cranberry juice is for the slightly more bitter taste than many other juices. On the whole a refreshing product at a reasonable price but when I am back in the UK I will probably be back onto the Tesco brand.