Making a good nonalcoholic wine is hard work. You have to first farm the grapes and make the wine, which, as anybody who’s worked a harvest, rotated a barrel or wrestled a recalcitrant hose can tell you, is no easy task.
Then you need to extract the alcohol. This is not so labor intensive, but it’s especially hard on the wine as you must subject it to the sort of technological manipulation that good winemakers abhor. Essentially, that means putting it through vacuum distillation using a spinning cone to deconstruct the wine into its component parts. You then set aside the alcohol and reassemble the other piece into a coherent whole.
Unfortunately, what remains lacks more than the alcohol. In wine, alcohol plays a greater role than as an intoxicant. It adds richness and body, it carries flavors and aromas, and it’s essential to the balance and structure of a wine. If it’s removed, something else must do that work.
Winemakers around the world have thrown themselves into the challenge for good reasons aside from the desire for an appealing nonalcoholic drink. While sales of alcoholic beverages have been stagnant over the last couple of years, the market for nonalcoholic beverages has rocketed upward. It grew by more than 30 percent last year, according to Nielsen, fueled primarily by concerns over wellness and moderation.
Naturally, producers from brewers to liquor companies want to capitalize on this trend. Bartenders can make compelling nonalcoholic cocktails by leaving out spirits. It’s simply a matter of creating beautiful, balanced combinations. Brewers can control the fermentation of beers to prevent the formation of alcohol, and can augment other ingredients like hops and malt to add flavors.
But the obstacles for winemakers are particularly daunting. Wine generally has much more alcohol and higher acidity than beer, and alcohol plays a larger role in its structure compared with other beverages.
“Once you take the alcohol out of the wine, you’re losing a lot of the support,” said Aaron Pott, of Pott Wine in Napa Valley who, with a partner, Stephanie Honig, also makes nonalcoholic wines under the Missing Thorn label. “It’s a sweet element and a density element, and a lot of people go to sugar to replace it.”
It’s a difficult problem, but not an impossible one. Over the last few weeks, I’ve tried several dozen nonalcoholic wines along with a number of wine alternatives, nonalcoholic beverages that are created to mimic wines rather than wines with the alcohol removed.
Most of them I found unpleasant. Many were cloyingly sweet. Others were out of balance or incomplete, as if the middle had been hollowed out. One was punishingly acidic. But I did find 10 bottles that, while I would not mistake them for good wine, I would drink happily if I were handed a glass at a party at which I was trying to avoid alcohol.
Let’s be clear: All of these are efforts in search of a solution — how to make perfectly winelike nonalcoholic wines — that has not yet arrived. We are early in the learning curve. Serious producers of nonalcoholic wines have discovered that simply trying to replace the alcohol of, say, a good German riesling or California pinot noir with other ingredients is a supreme challenge. They must instead rethink the whole process.
When Constance Jablonski and Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger decided in 2019 that they wanted to make a nonalcoholic sparkling wine, they enlisted Ms. Frerejean-Taittinger’s husband, Rodolphe Frerejean-Taittinger, who happened to be the chief executive of the Champagne house Frerejean Frères, and began experimenting.
“We realized you can take the best wine in the world and it’s not going to make a good alcohol-free wine,” he said in an interview. Mr. Frerejean-Taittinger likened making a good nonalcoholic wine to making Cognac.
“With Cognac, you need to create a base wine,” he said. “Most of the time, it’s literally undrinkable.”
They decided to center the production of their new company, French Bloom, in Limoux in Languedoc, itself a historic center of sparkling wine production, a warmer, sunnier place that would produce riper grapes than in Champagne. It’s also a less expensive place to do business.
“We needed a terroir where you have more sun, more alcohol and more muscle, but also a good level of acidity,” he said. Ms. Frerejean-Taittinger said they wanted a sparkling wine that would be made of organic ingredients and not full of sugar or chemicals and with no added sulfur dioxide, an almost universally used stabilizer and antioxidant.
Right now, they are making four different French Bloom sparkling wines. Le Blanc, made of sparkling spring water, dealcoholized wine, lemon juice and natural grape flavors, was too sweet, I thought, more like grape juice than wine. Le Rosé was made similarly, with some dealcoholized pinot noir for color. It was even sweeter. Both sell for $39.
The other two were definite steps up. An extra brut blanc de blancs was made of dealcoholized chardonnay along with a bit of salt and the other ingredients. It had the richness and floral, winy flavor that I was missing in the first two, with a clean, dry aftertaste. It was very good.
At the top of the line was Le Cuvée, a vintage-dated (2022) blanc de blancs intended to resemble a well-aged Champagne. Indeed, it was creamy, with a light caramel note like what might come from the gentle oxidation of long aging, though it seemed a touch too pronounced.
The blanc de blancs costs $59 and Le Cuvée $119. Champagne prices for Champagne facsimiles.
Mr. Frerejean-Taittinger described the winemaking process as an evolution in which they were striving for less sweetness, particularly in the rosé, and more finesse.
The Missing Thorn wines, made by Mr. Pott in California, were also quite good. The white was made with dealcoholized albariño, water, grape juice concentrate, natural flavors and gum arabic, which Mr. Pott called a “flavor encapsulator,” giving his wines more richness and density. It was balanced and seemed relatively complete with a minimal sense of missing components. The red, made with dealcoholized malbec, was likewise balanced and refreshing.
Mr. Pott said choosing the right grapes for nonalcoholic wines was essential.
“It has to have a lot of varietal character,” he said. “I think you need varieties that are really aromatic because you lose a lot.”
Some wine substitutes skirted that issue by skipping the dealcoholization process entirely. These were the wine alternatives, beverages that try to balance flavor and acidity in a way resembling wine without beginning with wine.
Proxies Blank Slate, for example, uses sauvignon blanc grapes and verjus, an acidic juice made by pressing unripe fruit, along with various fruit concentrates and flavor extracts. It was dry and juicy with flavors of apricots and grapefruits.
Kally Golden Sparkler, another wine alternative, which also used verjus and other ingredients, was dry and floral, with tart citrus flavors and a delicious tang and texture.
Because these wine alternatives don’t require the technological manipulation that the nonalcoholic wines do, it seems easier to create complete, satisfying beverages.
Since the market for all these nonalcoholic products is growing so rapidly, they are becoming easier to find. In New York, where I live, I found them in selected grocery stores and at two shops dedicated to them: Boisson and Spirited Away. But don’t bother looking for them in wine shops. New York is one of 17 states that does not allow nonalcoholic versions of wine, beer or spirits to be sold in wine and liquor stores.
Nonalcoholic Options to Try
Here are the 10 products I liked in order of least to most expensive.
Giesen Dealcoholized New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, $18 Not complete but, aromatically, it certainly suggests New Zealand sauvignon blanc.
Hollow Leg Alcohol Free Cabernet Sauvignon, $20 Smooth, relatively complete with a pleasant aftertaste. Made in Spain.
Missing Thorn White Alcohol-Removed Wine, $25 Balanced, not too sweet, relatively complete.
Tomorrow Cellars California Rhône Blanc Alcohol-Removed Wine, $25 Made of dealcoholized marsanne, vinous aromas, moderately sweet.
Proxies Blank Slate Non-Alcoholic Wine Alternative, $25 Juicy and dry with apricot and grape aromas, easy to drink.
Unified Ferments Jasmine Green, $25 Made with jasmine tea and kombucha culture, like a dry, complex iced tea.
Lautus Dealcoholized Rosé Sparkling Wine, $26 Dry and refreshing, made in South Africa.
Missing Thorn Red Alcohol-Removed Wine, $30 Well balanced, refreshing, complete.
Kally Golden Sparkler, $35 Tart, savory, delicious.
French Bloom Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs, $59 Floral, balanced, a pleasant facsimile of blanc de blancs.
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