This $13 bottle gets its flavor spike from coffee and cocoa

It is a quirk of nature that wine so rarely tastes or smells of the grapes from which it’s made. In this sense, it is quite unlike apple cider, another fermented fruit juice, but one which clearly conveys the flavor of its ingredients. Wine is more like sake, a beer-like drink brewed from rice that features a rainbow of flavors well beyond those found in rice, conjured through the magic of organic chemistry.

During the fermentation process, living yeast organisms consume the sugar present in grape juice and convert it to alcohol. However, countless other chemical reactions take place at the same time, some of which generate the distinctive esters and aldehydes that give sauvignon blanc its citrusy scent or syrah its whiff of peppercorns. While the necessary precursors, or building blocks, for these flavors must be present in these grapes in order for them to bloom in your glass, those flavors would not be apparent if you ate a grape fresh off the vine.

This wine is the original so-called “coffee pinotage” from South Africa and offers one of the world’s most vivid examples of non-grape flavors in a wine that were not present in its grapes. It may taste as if someone spiked your red wine with Kahlua, but there are no added flavors at all.

A cultured yeast strain and specialized oak barrels are able to coax out a remarkably vivid smell of espresso from the pinotage grape when combined in just the right sequence and temperature range. The resulting wine smells and tastes uncanny, like something cooked up in the Starbucks test kitchen just for adults to provide more than one kind of buzz. Think black cherry mochaccino, with a riot of coffee and cocoa flavors intertwined with the wine’s core of plummy fruit.

$12.99; 13% alcohol

PLCB Item #7510

Sale price through May 30 — regularly $14.99

Also available at:

Canal’s in Mt. Ephraim, N.J., — $13.99