According to the CDC, mixing caffeine and alcohol is not good for you. The caffeine causes you to feel more alert and prolongs your feelings of intoxication leading you to drink more. It’s a slippery slope, but people are still doing it, and have been doing it for some time.
Some crazy monks in the UK were mixing the two drugs long before red bull and vodka was a thing. Around the 1880s in Devon, England some French monks showed up to the Benedictine Buckfast monastery and started adding caffeine and other tonic ingredients to fortified Spanish wine already at the monastery and created the caffeinated fortified wine known as Buckfast.
As with many alcoholic drinks back in the day, Buckfast was consumed for medicinal purposes, and in the 1970s it was even marketed to housewives as a pick-me-up. The drink is still consumed and produced today at the Buckfast monastery where they estimate $10 million a year from selling their fortified wine.
Mixing caffeine and wine is one thing, but mixing coffee and wine is another. Our love for both of these drinks is endless, but should they be mixed? A company called Friends Fun Wine thinks so and has concocted two coffee-flavored wine beverages and we’re not too sure how we feel about it.
The company makes flavored wine drinks and currently has seven flavors but two caught our eye – Chardonnay coffee cappuccino and Cabernet coffee espresso. The Cabernet coffee espresso has “the rich flavor of cabernet grapes, espresso coffee, and a hint of chocolate,” according to their website. As for the Chardonnay coffee cappuccino, it “features refreshing chardonnay grapes with vanilla cappuccino and smooth hints of chocolate.”
Although these drinks are named after the energizing espresso, they won’t give you the boost you may be hoping for. The Fun Wine concoctions come in at 6 percent ABV and are low-cal but don’t actually contain any caffeine. So these drinks are more for when you have those hard-to-shake coffee-flavored wine cravings we so often get. The beverages are made in the EU with grapes from Europe, but no other information is given so we really have no idea what actually is in those 250 mL cans.
The libations can be served hot or cold and claim to be the world’s first coffee wine. As much as we love wine and coffee, we’re not sure if they’re meant to be mixed. And always drink caffeine and alcohol carefully.
