How to Make Cheap Red Wine Taste 10x Better
All summer long I’ve been an amateur mixologist in my kitchen for Parade, making some of the most refreshing and delicious summer drinks. Some have been amazing (vanilla bean lemonade) and some have given me pause (cola + coffee + chocolate milk, anyone?), but it's been a lot of fun.
I'm happy to report that my most recent Parade drink experiment is the best of both worlds. Ever heard of a kalimotxo (sometimes spelled calimocho)? Well, you’re about to make one and it’s going to be your new favorite drink to impress all your friends at your end-of-summer cookout. Read on for the details.
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What Is a Kalimotxo?
You might be familiar with booze-plus-soda combos like Jack Daniels and Coke, Jack Daniels and ginger ale or vodka and Sprite, but have you tried Coca-Cola and red wine? Once you have you can say you've had a kalimotxo.
Mixing Coca-Cola and red wine is nothing new in Spain, where this party-in-a-glass is from. A kalimotxo (or calimocho)—which is pronounced cal-ee-mo-cho—is the perfect drink for those hot and humid end-of-summer summer afternoons when you need something refreshing but have zero ingredients.
A kalimotxo is perfect for using leftover wine, like that bottle you grabbed to make bolognese and now have hanging around on your counter. It's also a great use for a bottle of red wine that might not be wild about. Really, any red wine that needs some pizazz will work here, and the best part is, it shouldn’t be fancy. The original 1920s-era recipe specifically used poor-quality red wine and the cola was meant to amp it up to a more drinkable level. Don’t go big here—use what you have lying around and get to sipping!
How Do you Make a Kalimotxo?
Courtesy of Jessica Wrubel
The recipe really couldn’t be easier—fill a rocks glass with ice and pour in half red wine and half cola. Garnish with a squeeze of lemon or a drop of bitters if you want to get really fancy.
What I Thought About Kalimotxo
Courtesy of Jessica Wrubel
I'll begin by saying that I'm not really a wine drinker. For someone in the food and drink world, I know less about wine than I'd like to admit. But I know that a cheap wine can be found at none other than Trader Joe's. Their "two buck chuck" (or, more recently, "three buck chuck") is known to be a great deal—a cheap wine without a ton of complexity but not the worst flavor. So I picked up a bottle of their red blend and got to work.
I decided to follow the recipe I found online, which was three ounces of cola and three ounces of red wine in a glass. I garnished with a squeeze of lemon but skipped the bitters. One sip of this and I can see why it's so popular in Spain. It no longer tasted like three-dollar wine. The Coke gave it some zip and enhanced the fruitiness of the wine and really balanced it out (that is, according to my non-wine drinker palate). The little squeeze of lemon heightened it, too and fooled me into thinking I was drinking a fancy glass of sangria on a summer patio. Try this one out the next time you have leftover wine hanging around. We won't tell anyone how easy it really is.
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