I was on the last leg of a long drive across the desert from my folks home to my home when I made a stop for a coke. Well, there it was, a Vanilla Coke, with its nifty brown coke label and I was stoked! I have a long relationship with the smell of vanilla. There is something soothing about it; it provokes comforting memories from childhood. Sure enough, when I opened the bottle the aroma was there. Lovely. So, I got back in my car and hit the highway with a few hours to go, the sun in hot pursuit, nailing me through my side window. I took one last sniff from the opened bottle and drank. It was dreadful! Now, maybe there are sodas meant for smelling and sodas meant for drinking, but I think you should be able to do both. Vanilla Coke has a flat taste that grows worse the warmer the drink gets. It coated my throat with a broad flavor that had little to do with the ethereal taste of vanilla. I suppose it has something to do with the attempt to recreate a natural flavor using only chemicals (the way those ’’scratch and sniff’’ books did when I was kid). Just awful. Well, sometimes it is best to stick with original.