Brace yourselves, y'all. We survived the strange combinations that are chocolate cheese and Flaming Hot Cheeto Bagels, but this one is about to break the brains of Millennials everywhere: someone made wine-infused coffee. What is day? What is night? Who even knows anymore? Now that we, as a species, have clearly given so very little regard for the basic order of things, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL. (To be clear, though, I'd trade wine-infused coffee for basic universal order in a hot second.)
For those of you who were hoping that this wine/coffee marriage would be like Four Loko but for far less ambitious partiers, a bit of bad news (or good, depending on how crunk you want to get before your 10 a.m. staff meeting): you can't actually get drunk from drinking it. Rick Molinari of Molinari Private Reserve in Napa Valley, CA created it to celebrate his love of coffee and wine (I mean, same), infusing the coffee beans with wine and then drying them out before they're hand-roasted in small batches to make coffee.
The result? A brew that wafts with the richness of wine, and has undertones of blueberry in it. And for those of you who milk your coffee as unrepentantly as I do, curiously enough, it tastes more like wine the more milk you add to it. And the longer you leave the coffee sitting — whether out at your desk, or chilled overnight — the more of the wine flavor it takes on.
We now cut to live footage of the taste buds of a human currently sampling the wine-infused coffee.
Right now the only way you can get your hands on this delicacy is ordering it from Molinari Private Reserve's website, where it sells for $19.95 for each half-pound bag. When you turn to our friend math, that's about 41 cups of coffee — aka, a serious investment in you, yourself, and you. And what better way to kick Monday in the butt than having that extra wine-flavored power boost in the morning?
Interestingly enough, studies have shown that even the mere act of smelling alcohol can make you feel a little bit tipsy, thanks to the olfactory and visual cues alcohol transmits to the brain. So maybe if you really do need that extra hit of relaxation without taking a hit of any of the real stuff, this might be an excellent way to (safely! legally!!) relax during a stressful work week. Go forth and caffeinate!
