- Wine cooler
A wine cooler is an
alcoholic beverage made fromwine andfruit juice , often in combination with acarbonated beverage andsugar .Traditionally home-made, beginning in the early 1980s, wine coolers have been bottled and sold by commercial distributors, especially in areas where their lower alcohol content causes them to come under less restrictive laws than wine itself. Because most of the flavor in the wine is obscured by the fruit and sugar, the wine used in wine coolers tends to be of the cheapest available grade. Since January 1991 when United States Congress [http://drvino.com/2007/09/20/wine-coolers-gone-and-almost-forgotten/ quintupled the excise tax on wine] , most producers of wine coolers dropped wine from the mix, substituting cheaper malt. These malt-based coolers, while sometimes referred to as "wine coolers," are in a different category of beverage - sometimes called "maltbeverage," "malternative," or just "cooler."
Bartles & Jaymes refers to their maltbeverage as a "flavored malt cooler".In
Germany , however, wine coolers became popular in2004 , when the German Government imposed an extra duty onalcopop s of 0.80 to 0.90 euro per bottle effective August 1, 2004. To circumvent higher taxation, some German producers have switched to wine coolers, which are being marketed the same way like alcopops.References
http://indiscriminate.tripod.com/misc/wine_coolers.htm
ee also
*
Alcopop
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.