Kalimotxo

The Basque Country's beloved red wine and cola combination, a youthful party drink that sounds wrong but tastes surprisingly right.

The Kalimotxo was born at the Fiestas de Puerto Viejo de Algorta in Getxo, a coastal municipality in the province of Biscay in the Basque Country of northern Spain, in 1972. According to the most widely documented account, festival organizers found themselves with a large quantity of wine that had spoiled or was of unacceptably poor quality — an embarrassment in a wine-drinking culture — and solved the problem by mixing it with Coca-Cola, which masked the wine's defects behind sweetness and carbonation. The resulting combination proved popular enough that attendees gave it a name combining the nicknames of two people connected to the drink's creation: Kalimero, from the Italian cartoon character Calimero (a small black chick who was the protagonist of a 1963 Italian animated series distributed in Spain), and Motxo, a Basque nickname. The word kalimotxo is specifically Basque spelling; in Spanish-speaking regions it is often rendered as calimocho. The drink spread from the Basque Country throughout Spain and into Latin America over the following decades, finding particular popularity at outdoor drinking gatherings called botellones — the distinctly Spanish practice of large groups of young people gathering in public spaces with their own purchased alcohol — and at summer festivals and fiestas where wine and cola are both inexpensive and widely available. Despite the objections of wine traditionalists, it has become one of the most consumed informal drinks in Spain.