The penultimate episode of Inventing Anna introduces us to a teenage Anna Delvey. Back then, she was just Anna Sorokin, a Russian immigrant in a small German town who was about to start a new life with her family. We see Anna as she’s chauffeured to a restaurant to be reunited with her father, Vadim. To help celebrate her arrival, Vadim orders an expensive bottle of red wine, a 1996 Chateau Petrus. It’s a move that immediately alarms young Anna.
“In Russia you never drank wine,” she says. “We never had anything nice. Once a year on your birthday, you had a Diet Coke... We never ate in restaurants.”
“You’ll like it,” her father insists.
Vadim was a truck driver in Russia, but in Germany, he’s reveling in a newfound splendor, the source of which probably has something to do with the bag of cash he had his daughter smuggle on her trip over. At least, this is the origin story that journalist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) has imagined for Anna, in an attempt to figure out how Anna Delvey came to be. But Vadim’s moment of luxury is interrupted when the waiter says that his manager wanted to make it clear that the bottle in question costs about $3,400. With a strained smile, Vadim confirms that he still wants the bottle — and orders a Diet Coke as well.
This particular beverage order — and Vadim’s subsequent move of pouring the soda on top of his glass of wine, to the shock of the waiter — could be seen as just an Inventing Anna plot point, an opportunity for Vadim to teach Anna this simple lesson: “You have to overwhelm these people with your superiority.”
It was certainly a lesson that Anna absorbed: Her breezy, holier-than-thou air helped her conduct a succession of cons and schemes once she got to the US and posed as a German heiress. But Vadim’s sullying of his wine acted as a flex that Max Leisure, who manages private clients at Verve Wine in New York City, says he’s heard of before.
“I was told a story once from a client who was finishing a big dinner in Hong Kong,” Leisure tells Tudum. “They closed a business deal, and the host made a big deal of showing off bottles of Lafite Rothschild, which runs you four figures retail... He topped off his own pour with Diet Coke and lime.”
But the origin of red wine and Coke — most commonly known as kalimotxo or calimocho — has little to do with wealthy businessmen. Variations of the drink existed throughout the first half of the 20th century, going by names such as Rioja Libre and Cuba Libre del Pobre, but it truly made its mark in Basque Country in the early 1970s. The lore surrounding it varies, but it’s generally agreed that, in 1972, organizers of a celebration at the Old Port of Algorta were stuck with thousands of liters of bad wine, needed to find a way to mask the unpleasant taste and turned to Coca-Cola. So, it’s less Lafite Rothschild, more... expired Two Buck Chuck.
Once the wine was mixed with Coke, given a new name and presented to the crowd, kalimotxo became a hit in the region, then throughout Spain and eventually elsewhere.
Elsewhere never seemed to reach the US, though. Plenty of articles pop up when you google “kalimotxo,” including a 2015 Marie Claire piece, “Let Me Explain Why Red Wine and Coke Is Actually an Amazing Combination.” Most people we spoke to stateside had no knowledge of this drink and even sounded appalled by the very idea of it. But Jana Hellen, a Spanish university student living in Barcelona, knew all about it.
“Kalimotxo is a very typical drink in Spain,” Hellen says. “It’s sort of a youth party drink because it’s so cheap! I also associate it with ‘fiestas de pueblo,’ which are the celebrations that each town or village has each year.” She even references a YouTube link to a Spanish punk song named after the drink.
So what do wine aficionados think of kalimotxo? While Leisure contends that describing Coke as “sugar water” is reductive — “Cola is a blend of spices and vanilla... cinnamon, nutmeg... ” — kalimotxo is not a drink he’d gravitate toward. He recommends a Vin Santo, an Italian dessert wine, for those who want a very sweet red wine experience.
Spanish wine experts, however, have a soft spot for the drink.
“To be honest, any Spanish sommelier who denies not having drunk kalimotxo as a teenager is lying,” says Miguel Crunia, sommelier at Fìon, an independent wine consulting group in Edinburgh, Scotland. He founded the Spanish Sommelier Association in 2020 as a means to promote the exciting Spanish craft scene in the UK and help counter Spain’s reputation as the land of “cheap” wine. But admittedly, it’s the mediocre stuff that’s made kalimotxo a rite of passage for generations of Spaniards.
“Kalimotxo doesn't call for good wine,” Crunia says. “We might be crazy for mixing up wine and Coke, but aren’t that crazy to misuse good juice for it... As sommelier I probably should be embarrassed for what I'm about to share with you... but I kinda take a bit of pride in it: I was the official kalimotxo mixer for my friends.”
Crunia reveals his preferred approach to drinking kalimotxo (out of a plastic bottle, shared between friends, no ice, just vibes) and explains that the bars that have it on the menu generally cater to younger crowds, the sorts of spots that a more posh clientele would avoid — meaning that while Vadim’s corruption of the Chateau Petrus is possible, it’s a pretty uncommon way of having a kalimotxo.
While we were skeptical about the drink — Coke and red wine? — you can’t knock it until you try it. So after buying a go-to red from the neighborhood wine shop and a Coke from the bodega, we mixed 3 ounces of cola with 3 ounces of wine in a short tumbler filled with ice. Some people throw in a wedge of lemon or lime, but we opted not to.
Survey says: somewhere between pretty good and aggressively fine. However, it was more palatable than expected. It even makes sense why The New York Times once dubbed it “the poor man’s sangria.” It really did taste a bit like sangria, sweet and refreshing, nice on a hot day when you want to spread your drinking out over long hours without getting too drunk too quickly. A New York City apartment in the cold of February was probably not an ideal setting for such a seasonally evocative drink, but there’s a good chance we’ll give the combination another shot when summer’s swelter rolls in. And we won’t be alone.
“If you ask me if I still drink kalimotxo... absolutely,” Crunia says. “Not as a general rule, but if I go to a pub and I fancy wine but its list only contains bulk wines... I just ask for a pint glass filled with ice, a 250-milliliter glass of their cheapest red and a Coke so I can do the magic. I just love to see the reaction of the bartenders when I do.”
