From work Christmas parties to checking in with the family, the phrase ‘Oh go on, it’s Christmas’ can be heard echoing in every home, restaurant, bar and shop. We spend the festive season socialising and celebrating - and a lot of the time this goes hand in hand with alcohol.
Sometimes, the amount of alcohol has proven overwhelming, and the need for redemption was born in the form of Dry January. The way we see it, taking part in Dry January gives you 31 days alcohol-free, but what if you did 2 days every week for one year? That’s 104 days alcohol-free, which I’m sure most of us do without trying. Just as fad diets tend to fail and have us yo-yoing between weights, there is a danger that abstaining may lead to more overconsumption later, so is an ‘everything in moderation’ mindset a healthier one?
Moving focus from just a ‘Dry January’ mindset, there has been a noted generational shift away from alcohol. Lots of young adults aren’t interested in drinking and are becoming increasingly health conscious, leading to a decline in drinking culture. This has resulted in a lot of alcoholic beverage producers starting to invest in low and no alcohol options. Sometimes maybe without enough research and development to create the best possible product, but to protect their space in the market, which is why there’s such a mediocre saturation of these products on the shelves.
It took us some time to find a non-alcoholic (NA) wine that we can really get behind, for a number of reasons. Many criteria go into such a selection, and in order to explain our process, we must first explore low and NA wine in a bit more depth.
A common question we get when customers are searching for the perfect NA wine is why are they all so sweet? To answer this, we must look at the fermentation and growing process. As grapes ripen, acidity drops and sugar levels rise. A crucial winemaking decision is when to pick, and this is something important to consider when making a low alcohol wine. The higher the sugars, the higher the potential alcohol in a wine. During alcoholic fermentation, yeast eats the sugar in grape juice and converts it to alcohol and CO2. The more alcohol a wine has in it, the more there is to remove. Winemakers have two options here for making low alcohol wine: firstly, to arrest a fermentation before all the sugar is gone, which results in a wine that has sugar leftover in it, and secondly, to pick grapes when they have slightly less sugar in them and therefore less potential alcohol. When drinking a low-alcohol wine that has had a fermentation stopped early, we should also consider the fact that it will have a higher sugar content - and is this that much better health-wise?
These two methods are perfectly showcased by our Casa de Vilacetinho Vinho Verde 2024 (11%) - a zippy and fresh (as well as wallet friendly) tipple, and something a little sweeter with our Alasia Brachetto d'Acqui 2023 (5%), both of which have so far been flying out this year.
NA wine is legally defined as containing less than 0.5% ABV. Interestingly, this is a very similar amount of alcohol that you naturally find in standard fruit juice, ripe bananas and even a slice of sourdough bread!
Winemakers then have a variety of options to de-alcoholise wine, with the most widely used methods being vacuum distillation, reverse osmosis and spinning cone columns. Once the alcohol is removed, the wine has to be carefully reconstructed to recreate the familiar taste, mouthfeel and aroma of traditional wine.
Vacuum Distillation – this method gently heats the wine to around 35°C under vacuum conditions. The reduced pressure allows alcohol to evaporate at a lower temperature and avoids cooking the wine, as well as helping to preserve some more of the delicate aromas.
Reverse Osmosis – here, the wine passes through a series of fine membranes that separate individual components, including alcohol. The alcohol is removed, and the remaining components are blended back together. While this method allows more control over how much alcohol is removed, it also strips a lot of the colour and flavour compounds from the wine.
Spinning Cone Columns – wine flows down a vertical series of spinning cones, creating a centrifuge in which the components are again separated from the liquid, and winemakers can decide what they reintegrate. This method preserves the most delicate flavour and aroma compounds as it requires little to no heat. The spin cone method is also very good at capturing the other compounds to reintroduce later with higher precision.
In the argument of still vs sparkling de-alcoholised wine, we may explore a few ways in which they differ. Firstly, it is important to look at the psychology that impacts the choice between still and sparkling. In general, we find that NA sparkling wines are purchased to involve non-drinkers in a celebration of some sort more than NA still wines. The atmosphere in which you consume food and drink has been proven to have a profound impact on your perception of the quality/flavours. Meaning that when associating the wine with a celebration, we would generally be of the opinion that sparkling tastes better.
Carbonation can also mask the sweetness from the natural sugars that we discussed above, which explains why NA sparkling wines tend to come closer to tasting like “the real thing”. Often, tea is added to NA sparkling wines, which helps to boost fragrance as well as tannin - creating that ‘dry’ profile that is famously hard to replicate in NA beverages.
In addition, white wine tends to lean towards lighter and fruitier flavour profiles, with less tannin and body in comparison to red wine (very generally speaking). As a result of this, white NA wines seem to dominate the market. Once you take alcohol away from red wine, it is common to be left with a juicy but very tannic beverage. If we then try to balance the tannins, as well as take away the alcohol, we are left with a lacklustre, flabby drink.
A very sensible question is, why go through the effort of fully fermenting a wine just to remove the alcohol later? The answer lies in fermentation itself. Fermentation not only produces alcohol but also textures, tastes and aromatic compounds, and although ethanol has no distinctive taste, it plays a significant role in the body and mouthfeel of a wine.
While the process in removing alcohol is not technically difficult, the art in making high quality, NA wine comes from the reintegration of these other compounds back into the wine. Winemakers can reintroduce grape compounds back into a wine to mimic the mouthfeel and tannins that are removed through the above processes.
When discussing this subject, we came on to the topic of NA beer as a comparison. There are proportionately more NA beers on the market that are held in high regard than there are NA wines. This is due to a number of reasons including the method of brewing being very similar to alcoholic beer, usually finding that different strains of yeast are used in order to keep alcohol production as low as possible.
It is also important to note that there are more moving parts when it comes to ingredients with beer. When it comes to NA wine, we must first start with great grapes as a base before we remove the alcohol if we want the wine to stand a chance. Whereas in beer, it is more simple to construct an ideal base with more options to add in different varieties of hops and grains to play with different flavour profiles.
There is something to be said for the fact that as beers tend to be lower in alcohol than wine, when we remove that alcohol from the equation, it has less of an effect on the overall structural integrity of the liquid meaning that it is relatively less easy to notice the absence of alcohol in beer rather than wine.
While the technology around NA wine continues to improve, it is still not quite at the level it should be, and as a result, truly high-quality NA wine can still be difficult to find. We make a point of trying them at every portfolio tasting we attend, and at Le Vignoble we remain selective about the wines that earn a place on our shelves – because if we’re going to skip the alcohol, we still expect the wine to pull its weight.
Bischöfliche DOM Zero Riesling is our chosen NA wine. The Riesling grapes come from the Mosel region in Germany, and you should expect everything you would from a traditional Riesling: crisp citrus, green apple and light blossom on the nose, with vibrant acidity and a clean, dry, mineral finish.
Our ultimate thoughts on all of this are that if you’re going to skip the booze, make sure to know what to look for so you can make the right choice with your NA options. While they still don’t measure up to the real deal, and probably won’t for a while, with some testing and trying you might find the one that fits your palette. Or maybe once you weigh up all the factors mentioned above, you will even decide that the best way to retain a healthy relationship with wine is to consume it in moderation – drink less but drink higher quality wines that you really actually enjoy!
Written by Maja Syska & Mhairi Fairbairn