cocaine until it was removed from the recipe in 1903.
However, less known is the story of how Coca-Cola is derived from an alcoholic drink based on cocaine and wine, Bordeaux to be more specific, a combination that made for a toxic drink known as Coca Wine.
In the second half of the 19th century, everybody drank this thing. Even the Pope is “made” of this cocktail alcoholic drink with a drug. The Coca Wine developed first time in 1863 by Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani.
The brand name of “Vin Mariani” which consisted of peruvian coca leaves, and wine of Bordeaux, it became a success overnight.
The advertising in Europe and the united states argue that the tonic “to cure the blues… restore the health, strength, energy and vitality”.
Indeed, when the alcohol combined with cocaine, they form a chemical substance which produces a more powerful and longer lasting sense of euphoria as far as it can cause the cocaine by itself.
Vin Mariani was one of the favorite drinks of famous of the time such as Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, Sarah Bernhardt, ulysses s. Grant and queen Victoria.
Pope Leo XIII personally approved the wine, he lent his face to an advertising campaign of the brand and was honoured with the gold medal of the Vatican.
In a marketing campaign, the Vin Mariani showed remarkable clients and published a leather-bound booklets with pictures and quotes of celebrities who were fans of the drink.
So, while the society is “made” by the Coca Wine of Mariani, the market grew and began to appear imitators.
In 1880, Georgia, USA, the pharmacist John Pemberton developed a popular drink based on the version of Mariani, who named Pemberton’s French Wine Coca.
When the state passed the laws of Prohibition in 1886, Pemberton had to find a non-alcoholic version of the drink, and would replace the wine with syrup. The new drink called Coca-Cola (cocaine remained the main component of the new drink for almost two decades yet).
In spite of the prohibition of alcohol in Atlanta, the French Wine Coca continued until the death of Pemberton in 1888, overtaking and the non-alcoholic version, Coca-Cola.
The Pemberton, was addicted to morphine after an injury to the American Civil war, took on the market of the French Wine Coca for the upper class of intellectuals, such as scientists, scholars, lawyers, and doctors.
He called it “a wonderful empowering means of genital mutilation”, having added ingredients that were missing from the Vin Mariani, as the damiana, a famous herb for the treatment of impotence, as well as a source of caffeine. Both later included in Coca-Cola.
As well as the growing fear of drug abuse made the drinks on the basis of the cocaine less popular, the successors of the Pemberton took the precaution of cocaine from the drink (at least most of it) in 1903, 11 years before it was banned officially the drug in 1914, forcing the Vin Mariani and other Coca Wine to run out of work.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola became the favourite drink of America and later throughout the world. Despite the historical evidence, the Coca-Cola Company denies officially the presence of cocaine in any of its products, either now or in the past.
Source
How a mixture of wine and COCAINE became the well-known Coca Cola… [photos]
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