Alt+Wine

Today, Friday February 12th, 2010, Alt+Wine is celebrating one of the most incredible creations - complete with sensational rise to fame and embarrassing demise - the beverage industry has ever had. In the 1800’s, at least. (Let’s be honest, it’s no Crystal Pepsi.)

It’s Coca-Wine!

A LITTLE HISTORY:

Coca-Wine became an international sensation starting in 1863 when a Corsican entrepreneur named Angelo Mariani created his version of Coca-Wine, Vin Mariani. It soon became the “prescription” of choice for all the European A-Listers of the mid-1800s whose ranks included Queen Victoria, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, King Alphonse XIII of Spain (pictured below), Alexander Dumas and even President William McKinley.

The craze soon hit the US where our friend Theodore Metcalf in Boston took a swing at it. Another American that embraced Coca-Wine was pharmacist John Pemberton, who made his own version named “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca” and marketed it as an “intellectual beverage” and “a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs.”

In 1886, Atlanta introduced Prohibition, so Pemberton replaced the wine with sugar syrup. And thus was born “Coca-Cola: The Temperance Drink.” (According to cocaine.org, it is now official Coca-Cola company policy to deny the existence of the drug in any of its past recipes.)

Soon Coca-Cola was being prescribed to patients with a morphine dependency, and low and behold, they were becoming addicted to BOTH.

So let’s take a look at this, shall we? The effects of US Prohibition, along with the rise of the mafia and ridiculous shipping laws that still exist today, included widespread legal drug use and subsequent dependency.

Why am I not surprised?

Join Alt+Wine as we celebrate this scandalous and illustrious beverage. For the next few hours, anyway.