There's juice loose aboot this hoose! (Maynards Winegums)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Maynards Winegums
Date:	31/10/09 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fruity, juicy, cheerful, traditional, inexpensive

Disadvantages: Very high in sugar, not vegetarian, taste nothing like wine

Having written about Maynards Wine Pastilles recently, it seems sensible to move on to the sweet with which Maynards really made their name: Wine Gums. Although the company (now owned by Cadbury) was formed in the 1890s, what has become their signature product was launched in 1909 - info direct from Cadbury's site, so not the 1896 stated in the category intro - which means that this very year marks its centenary. Hurrah! Let's have a look and see whether we should be launching Wine Gums parties all over the place, or whether it would be the decent and honourable thing to do to slink away along the back streets before anyone spots our shame.

Wine Gums are not often in the papers (well, unless someone's left a few on the train), but a few weeks ago they did pop up on the news when a 15-year-old boy was banned from buying a pack in a 99p store because a member of staff was under the impression that they were alcoholic. This, of course, is not the case at all: they are simply fruit-flavour chewy sweets. Like the Wine Pastilles, their colourings are made from such things as stinging nettle and spinach, so mind how you go out there!

I bought a 52g roll from the local corner shop for 42p, but they are also available in larger packets which are better value if you're buying them to share out. Mine showed a cartoon of the infamous Scotsman many will remember from the "Set the juice loose" adverts on the telly some years ago now. (Actually they spelt it "joose" on screen - I've just watched the ad on YouTube!) This time he's advertising an instant-win competition: you can apparently win cash if you find a winning message inside the wrapper. It goes without saying that I didn't. (If you are in Northern Ireland then no purchase is necessary to win; this is because the Gambling Act 2005, which allows draws conditional on the purchase of a product, does not apply there. So now you know!)

Other than that, the wrapper is mostly a rather nice orange-red colour, with the traditional (and also attractive) rainbow-coloured Maynards logo fairly prominent. On the nutritional front, one roll - which contains 12 sweets - provides 170 kcal, which doesn't seem too terrible. However, the 29.2 grams of sugar in a single tube is very nearly a third of an adult's Guideline Daily Amount! These sweets are not suitable for vegetarians - it's that bovine gelatine again, I'm afraid - and may also contain traces of milk and wheat, as well as the dreaded sulphites. (*Which* sulphites, though?)

Inside, there's a pleasant enough fruity smell, if rather an artificial one, and the dozen round sweets are packed end to end. Traditionally, wine gums (in general, not just Maynards' version) have the names of various alcoholic drinks lettered on their tops - CLARET, WINE and so on - and that convention is followed here. Unfortunately, the ones in my roll hadn't been lettered very well, and you really had to squint to make out anything at all. A couple of the blackcurrant ones just had a large "M" logo instead.

Eating these Wine Gums, what stands out to a connoisseur of wine gums (blimey, keeping the capitalisation correct here is a nightmare!) is that these are quite soft. The sweets I buy from my local independent sweet shop are quite a bit tougher, and take some chewing before the flavour really comes through, but Maynards have clearly decided that their customers want a quicker hit of juiciness, and so the fruitiness is there almost at once. Again, although you'd never mistake it for real juice from a real orange or whatever, the flavour is refreshing and fruity. The downside of this is that the sweets don't last all that long - and just occasionally you can get tiny bits stuck between your teeth, which is annoying.

Maynards Wine Gums are a pretty good example of the breed. They may not be the most sophisticated sweet on the block, and personally I would prefer them to have been a little harder, but you can't argue with the amount of juice you, well, set loose. The sugar content is rather terrifying, though, so I advise that you under no circumstances think about that whilst eating them!

Summary: A hundred years and still going strong must mean something