A wine cooler can refer to two different things: a refrigeration appliance designed to keep wine at a certain temperature, or an alcoholic beverage made from wine and fruit juice, often in combination with a carbonated beverage and sugar. Traditionally, wine coolers were homemade drinks that combined wine with fruit, sugar, and carbonated water to create a new and unique "wine" flavor. They became extremely popular in the 1980s when big distributors started creating and bottling their own commercial versions of the drink. Because most of the flavor in the wine is obscured by the fruit and sugar, the wine used in wine coolers tends to be of the cheapest available grade. Wine coolers have been bottled and sold by commercial distributors since the early 1980s, especially in areas where their alcohol content, lower than wine, causes them to come under less restrictive laws than table wines. Nowadays, wine coolers are not as popular as they used to be, and spritzers have seemingly won the popularity contest.