Commercial wine mixes and coolers

Commercial bottled blends of fruit juices and wine had their moment as wine coolers and still sell. The development of artificial essences of peach, apricot, raspberry and so on helped this trade enormously. When it comes down to it, some of the best are duplications of the most successful fresh mixes of wine and fruit juice - orange juice and sparkling wine (Buck's Fizz) and peach juice and sparkling wine (Bellini). The commercial brands can taste a bit artificial however and are invariably very sweet.

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

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 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 "malt beverage," "alternative," or just "cooler." Bartles & Jaymes refers to their malt beverage as a "flavored malt cooler".

In Germany, however, wine coolers became popular in 2004, when the German Government imposed an extra duty on Alco pops 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 Alco pops.