The 7 calories per gram comes from the Atwater paper published in 1902 and is citation #15 under the references of the Wikipedia page.
I get that alcohol has calories in the sense if you put it in a bomb calorimeter it'll output 7 calories per gram of ethanol. You can put a gram of uranium 237 in a bomb calorimeter and measure 20 billion calories, that does not automatically mean the body has the ability to use those as sources of energy for cellular respiration, which last I checked only functions on glucose. Also the wiki page also states that 90% of the metabolism happens in the liver, which again, is not where cellular respiration across the rest of the body is happening.