Coffee Wine: What Is Actually Sold Under the Name

Coffee wine is a loose name for four quite different things: wine with coffee added, coffee beans aged in old wine barrels, fermented drinks made from the coffee fruit, and a handful of coffee-flavoured alcoholic drinks that are sold near wine but are something else. Which one you are looking at decides whether it contains alcohol, caffeine, or both.

Wine infused with coffee

This is what most people mean. A finished wine is blended or infused with coffee or coffee flavour and sold as a single bottle or can.

• Friends Fun Wine. A Miami company that launched canned coffee wines under the claim of the world's first: Cabernet Coffee Espresso, with espresso and a hint of chocolate, and Chardonnay Coffee Cappuccino, with vanilla cappuccino flavour.
• Apothic Brew. A California red blend infused with cold brew coffee, bottled at 13.5 percent alcohol. Reviewers note it carries very little caffeine, less than a cup of decaf.

In the United States a wine like this does not fit any of the standard classes such as red or white table wine. Federal labelling rules then require a truthful statement of composition on the label in place of a class name, which is why these bottles describe exactly what went in.

Coffee aged in wine barrels

The second meaning has no alcohol at all. Green coffee beans are rested inside barrels that once held wine, so they take on some of its aroma, and are then roasted and sold as ordinary coffee.

Cooper's Cask Coffee is one of the best known. Its wine barrel range pairs single origins with barrels that held Cabernet, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and the roaster describes the result as the pleasures of wine with none of the alcohol. The Cooper's Cask Wine Barrel Aged Box Set collects them, and the rest of the range, including whiskey and rum barrels, sits on the Cooper's Cask Coffee page. Coffees with this character are grouped under barrel-aged tasting notes.

Because the beans are roasted after ageing, any alcohol that might have been present is long gone. What remains is flavour: dried fruit, a winey sweetness, sometimes oak.

Drinks made from the coffee fruit

Coffee beans are the seeds of a fruit, and the dried skin and pulp around them is called cascara. It can be fermented. Sydney roaster Campos Coffee and Melbourne Moonshine made what they called the world's first cascara liqueur, a limited run of 100 bottles using cascara from a mill in Costa Rica, and a cascara beer was brewed in 2011 with El Salvador producer Aida Batlle. These are rare, and they taste of the fruit rather than of roasted coffee.

What coffee wine is not

Several popular coffee drinks with alcohol get called coffee wine and are not wine.

• Coffee liqueurs. Kahlua and Mr Black are spirits-based liqueurs. Mr Black lists 25 percent alcohol, far stronger than wine.
• Hard coffee. Rebel Hard Coffee blends Colombian coffee, cream and alcohol and is a flavoured malt beverage, closer to beer in how it is made and taxed.

The whole family of alcoholic coffee drinks is sorted by type in its own guide, and the two best-known coffee cocktails are compared in carajillo vs espresso martini.

Does coffee wine have caffeine?

It depends on the kind. Wine infused with real coffee can carry a little caffeine, though makers of the best known examples keep it low. Wine barrel aged coffee has the full caffeine of any coffee and no alcohol. Cascara drinks carry a small amount from the fruit. If caffeine matters, check the label or the maker's page before assuming either way.

How to serve it

Coffee-infused red wines are usually served slightly cool, like any fruity red, and pair with chocolate desserts. Barrel-aged coffee is brewed like any other bean: a pour over or French press shows the aroma best, and adding milk tends to hide it.