wine cooler

A wine cooler is an alcoholic beverage made from malt and fruit juice, often in combination with a carbonated beverage and sugar.

Traditionally home-made, in recent decades these 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 Congress quintupled the excise tax on wine, producers of wine coolers dropped wine from the mix, substituting cheaper malt. Then they dropped the term wine altogether and now have such things as the "melon cooler" and "fuzzy navel cooler." Bartles & James refers to their maltbeverage as a "flavored malt cooler".

See also

• Alcopop

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