Red red wine vinegar powder, you make my tongue feel so fine

I first encountered these a couple weeks ago at Whole Paycheck and then again at another store that I cannot recall. Apparently the brand is trying to make inroads into the Wisconsin snack market. When I see a new brand of chips on a store shelf I wonder why then. Have Graza's chips always been available to Wisconsin retailers but none have taken the plunge until recently? Or did some distributor somewhere decide to bring them into the state? (Graza appears to be a Brooklyn, NY company, though I dunno where the chips are made.)

Graza appears, at its core, to be a purveyor of olive oil and so the bag proudly proclaims that these chips were fried in 100% extra virgin olive oil. The bag also says that its contents was "inspired by the chips we first fell in love with in Spain!" Is it mere coincidence that I ran into Spanish-made chips at roughly the same time? Graza's website notes that the chips are made with potatoes that have yellow skin and yellow flesh and also a high starch to water ratio. Their competitors, Graza claims, use bog "standard white chipping potatoes" with less starch. The site also notes that they source their spuds from farms in North Dakota and northern Illinois which gives them a fairly local provenance as far as we in Madison are concerned.

These chips had one of the more complex aromas of any salt & vinegar chips that I've sampled.

Ooh! I remember now. I ran into them at Meat People after seeing them on the shelves of Whole Paycheck.

Sticking my face into the bag and huffing, I got a big oil aroma followed by sweetly scented spuds and then a fair dose of vinegar. But I also smelled roastiness - browned sugary bits along with a very mild bitterness.

There were a lot of large diameter chips in the bag and brown centers were common. Overall bubbles were on the less frequent side. They were sliced thicker than normal which runs contrary to the ad copy on the Graza website which claims the spuds were cut 20% thinner than average. Obviously Graza and I have different definitions of what is normal chip thickness. Without busting out calipers, I will say that I use Lay's chips as a benchmark. They're the gigantic chip maker here, after all, and their non-kettle chips are rather thin. They are very thin and usually very pale - the opposite of these Graza chips.

The added thickness meant that these were nice and crunchy. I don't think I'd ever seen potato chips with such brown centers and assume the sugary starchy stuff is concentrated there. It wasn't surprising then to taste a very well-done type of roastiness that complemented the sweetness of the spuds. I didn't taste any extra salt and the vinegar was on the mild side, though stuffing multiple chips into my mouth at once yielded a decent tang.

I found these Graza chips to be quite tasty, especially the extra roasty-toasty flavor. That they were made with red wine vinegar powder is something that sets them apart but I have to admit I didn't really taste it until I read the ingredients list.