Taste Test: Grapple
Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature "Taste Tests." Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments.
Grapple, 4.99 for a 4-pack
The apple is pretty much the big daddy of the fruit group. Trendy poseurs like pomegranate and acai will come and go, but the apple is your go-to fruit, good for repelling doctors, fermenting into wussy alcoholic beverages, and tempting naked garden-dwellers in equal measure.
So how can you improve on perfection? You can't. How can you screw with perfection and then charge twice as much for it? Inject it with artificial grape flavoring, that's how! Enter the Grapple ("say grape-L," the packaging helpfully instructs), slogan: "Looks like an apple. Tastes like a grape!" Or, perhaps alternately, "Half apple, half grape, 100 percent affront to God!" Marketed as a way to fight childhood obesity by introducing produce to kids' diets ('cause kids hate apples, but man do those grapes drive 'em wild!), the Grapple isn't a Mendelian hybrid like a pluot or Tomacco, but rather a plain old Fuji apple infused with grape flavor via a super-secret, patented process.
Taste: The Grapple smells strongly of artificial grape, very reminiscent of cheap candy or children's cough syrup. Otherwise, it's completely indistinguishable in appearance, size, or texture from an everyday (although somewhat substandard) apple. Cognitive dissonance aside, the Grapple isn't that remarkable in flavor either. The apple taste is noticeably adulterated, but it doesn't necessarily scream "I'm a grape!" What is remarkable is the aftertaste: the Grapple seems to leave a saccharine-y film on the tongue, something that neither a grape nor an apple usually does.
Office reactions: "It lingers more grape than apple." "If someone gave me this and didn't tell me it was a Grapple, I wouldn't make the connection. I'd just think I was eating a weird apple." "Could be worse." "It's more apple than grape." "It tastes like it's been dipped in some sort of liquid made out of Pixie Sticks." "That's disgusting. Like Nehi you can chew." "I feel like I have to brush my teeth after this." "Tastes like a fake flavor put in a real product. I would eat it again. Maybe." "That was entirely unnecessary." "Finally."
Where to get them: Grapples are only available seasonally, according the the website, when "Mother Nature cooperates and gives us some fresh, wonderful apples to produce more wonderful eating experiences for you and your family!" They should be around through the fall and winter, in select supermarkets.