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 Touted as the first coffee wine the Miami based Easy-to-drink Wine in a Can introduced the world's first Cabernet Coffee Espresso and Chardonnay Coffee Cappuccino last week.
Cabernet Coffee Espresso features a rich flavor of fresh cabernet grapes, espresso coffee, and a hint of chocolate. Chardonnay Coffee Cappuccino features sweet, refreshing Chardonnay grapes with vanilla cappuccino coffee and smooth hints of chocolate. These flavours are sold in 250mL slim cans containing two servings per can. At just 6% alcohol, the wine is apparently targeted at the youth as a party drink and an alternative to beer. The calories are low (75 calories per serving). Interestingly, the company says the coffee drink is non-decaffeinated.
‘It’s a Coffee Illusion. It’s a wine revolution. It’s Coffee. It’s wine. It’s the World’s first coffee wine,’ says an ad in their Facebook page and thus introducing possibly a third category of ‘wine producers’. There are the passionate winemakers running relatively small family-owned wineries, who give all they have to let the terroir bring out the true expression in their wine. Then there are corporatized wine makers who look at the bottom line more critically than what’s in the glass. There is the new category that does not necessarily have the passion for wine nor the cross-border sales and earnings by the multi-nationals, but they see as a business possibility and are willing to take their chances as entrepreneurs.
Creating coffee flavours without infusing any coffee is not new. South African Pinotage when made in certain style and using barrels with certain specifications bring out coffee flavours to such an extent that it is known as coffee Pinotage. Scoffed at by the wine experts and snobs, it did find a niche market and one can apparently still find several such wines at the supermarket shelves as I did during my visit to South Africa a couple of years ago.
Most reactions to the introduction by the wine critics have been insinuating that it is a disgusting idea to have coffee infused flavours. This might however be a case of bad publicity being better than no publicity. One FB Post of this wine mentions ‘I drink coffee because I need it and wine because I deserve it.’
We hope and presume that none of our subscribers ‘deserve’ this wine. The earlier variants of wines in the can are available at Wal-Mart stores throughout Florida and Texas. ‘Coffee Wines’ are not available in stores yet but the Post in the Facebook promises that it would be soon. It would be interesting to see how the consumers react to the concoction that cannot be termed a wine in most countries with active wine laws. From the can, it is not clear if this concoction is termed labeled as wine. For Wine’s sake, let us hope it isn’t!
Subhash Arora |