Inside the Quest to Make Better Non-Alcoholic Wines
Caitlin A. Miller is a New York-based wine writer and a senior editor for SevenFifty Daily. Her work has appeared in Food & Wine, Vinous, and Christie’s International Real Estate Magazine. She holds the WSET Diploma in Wines, the WSET Level 2 Award in Spirits, and was the recipient of the 2020 Vinous Young Wine Writer Fellowship.
As non-alcoholic wine rapidly gains ground, producers are working to figure out how winemaking changes when alcohol is taken out of the equation
While many sectors of the beverage alcohol industry are struggling with declining sales, the no- and low-alcohol category continues to grow. The IWSR predicts the category will see a compound annual growth rate of more than four percent between 2024 and 2028. And while non-alcoholic wine is experiencing growth, its sales are well below more established categories like non-alcoholic beer.
Some winemakers see this as a huge opportunity for the industry, but realizing a significant increase in sales will depend on increasing the quality of non-alcoholic wines. Data shows that most consumers who buy non-aloholic wine also buy alcoholic wine, so they assume a certain level of quality, but it can still be difficult to find non-alcoholic wines that meet those quality expectations.
Nevertheless, winemakers around the world are diligently working to meet those expectations and raise the quality and reputation of the category. Their approaches are wide ranging, and sometimes quite distinct, but each producer is making strides, and creating some of the best non-alcoholic wines yet. Here’s how they’re doing it.
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Technology Versus Technique
“To make a better quality non-alcoholic wine, there are three important pillars,” says Irem Eren, the business development and sales director for BevZero. “The first one is the incoming wine—the base wine. The second one is the dealcoholization process—the technology. And the third one is the reformulation or post-dealcoholization adjustments. If one of those three pillars is not good enough, then we will have difficulty.”
For years, many non-alcoholic winemakers focused on the technology required to remove alcohol, and for good reason. When Rodolphe Taittinger, the winemaker for the alcohol-free sparkling wine company French Bloom, began dealcoholizing wine, “We used to lose about 90 percent of the aromas,” he says. Now, using more advanced technology that can separate the alcohol at a lower temperature, they’re only losing 60 percent of the aromas. The ability to retain significantly more aromas was a huge boost to the quality of their product.
But Taittinger wasn’t satisfied. “You’re still losing 60 percent of the aroma, and you’re also losing the backbone of the wine, you’re losing the texture, you’re losing a lot of things.” So Taitinger turned his attention to the base wine, believing that the next phase of quality improvements would come from developing better non-alcoholic winemaking techniques.
In Germany, Christian Nett, the winemaker for Bergdolt Reif & Nett, has gone through a similar thought process. He started producing their non-alcoholic range after trialing the Solos Technology developed by Dr. Alexander Hässelbarth and Claudia Geyer. He was so impressed with the results that he’s no longer worried about the technology side of non-alcoholic winemaking. Like Taittinger, he’s now turned his attention to the techniques involved.
“The advancement of the technology is good,” says Nett. “Now, we have to learn to use the technology to get more experience with it.”
What Happens to Wine When Alcohol is Removed?
“We can dealcoholize any wine,” says Eren. “However, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to give a good result. So, the [base] wine needs to be clean without any faults because if you have, let’s say, volatile acidity, it’s going to concentrate.”
Alcohol is one of wine’s key structural components, therefore, removing it throws off balance the wine’s other structural elements—especially acidity. “Alcohol inherently has a perceived sweetness,” says Duncan Shouler, the director of innovation for Giesen Wines, which first launched an alcohol-removed wine five years ago. “When you lose the sweetness of alcohol, the acidity therefore becomes more pronounced, so you’ve got to find ways to balance that as best you can.”
An obvious solution is to add sugar or grape juice concentrate to replace the alcohol, which is why most non-alcoholic wines are off-dry or sweet. But if a winemaker hopes to make a non-alcoholic wine that better emulates its dry, alcoholic counterpart, there are other options to try, such as creating a base wine with less acidity.
“If you choose vineyards that [create grapes that] naturally have slightly lower acidity, then you’ve got a lower acidity base wine—and therefore, a lower-acidity final wine,” says Shouler. It’s also possible to de-acidify base wine in the cellar using potassium bicarbonate or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), which reacts with tartaric acidity and causes it to fall out in the form of tartrates.
As it is in standard winemaking, malolactic fermentation is also an option to soften acidity, but employing it only makes sense for white grapes that work well with malo—Chardonnay, for example. “For some wines, it does help a lot, but for others, you try to avoid it,” says Shouler.
There’s also the body and textural element of the wine; alcohol is responsible for much of the richness and weight of a wine, so without it, non-alcoholic wines could seem thin and unbalanced. Sparkling wines have the benefit of texture from bubbles, as evidenced in some of the successful non-alcoholic sparkling wines on the market today. But for still wines, Shouler might use lees stirring or the addition of mannoproteins or specific inactivated yeast products.
It’s important, Shouler feels, not to take this manipulation too far. “Sometimes there’s a temptation to try and create a zero-alcohol wine that has the same amount of body as a full-alcohol wine,” he says. “Often that’s a mistake because without alcohol, it can never be quite the same.
So, What Makes a Good Base Wine?
The quality of a non-alcoholic wine will depend on the quality of the base wine. But what exactly is the optimal type of base wine to produce the best possible dealcoholized wine?
Some producers view the situation simply—use the best-quality wine to create the best possible dealcoholized wine. “The process in the winery for making dealcoholized [white] wines is as simple as it could be,” says Nett. “If it will be a good wine with alcohol, it will be a good wine without alcohol.”
Others, however, have come to a different conclusion. “We realized that you can take the best wine in the world, and if you dealcoholize it, you’re not going to make good alcohol-free wine,” says Taittinger. “That’s really the biggest thesis that we put in place after four years of R&D—you really have to completely rethink the way you make the base wine.”
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Instead, Taittinger takes inspiration from Champagne. For example, the vin clairs for Champagne are often low in alcohol, highly acidic, and harsh tasting, but a winemaker knows this base is required to balance the wine after the second fermentation in the bottle. Similarly for a dealcoholized wine, Taittinger knows that he will lose aromas, texture, and structure during the dealcoholization process, so he creates a base wine with exaggerated characteristics.
“We create an almost undrinkable base wine,” says Taittinger. “We age [the base wine] in [new] barrels, but we age without sulfites, so the wine becomes super oxidative.” The goal is to create a base wine that is overly oxidative and oaky so that when 60 percent of the aromas are gone, you’re left with a flavorful, well-balanced non-alcoholic wine that retains the toasty, nutty aromas that are associated with traditional-method sparkling wine.
The Challenge of Dealcoholizing Red Wine
The tannins in red wines, however, create a unique challenge, according to Nett. “When you take away the alcohol from the red wines, the tannins—even if they are pretty smooth in a wine with alcohol—are coming out really green, sometimes really harsh, and it’s not a good feeling because the silkiness and the alcohol-based substance is missing,” he says.
Unlike whites, you cannot treat dealcoholize red wines the same as their alcoholic counterparts. Longer macerations or time in barrels, which can increase tannin levels, doesn’t help the quality or texture of the final product as it might for an alcoholic red wine. “If we have 15 percent yield loss … the tannins will also concentrate by 15 percent,” says Eren. “If you have 30 percent yield loss, everything will concentrate by 30 percent.”
Nett has also found that grape variety plays a big role here. His less tannic, dealcoholized Pinot Noir worked well after some trial and error, but his dealcoholized Cabernet Sauvignon, which develops less ripe tannins in Germany’s cooler climate, never reached the quality level he was looking for.
At Zeronimo, a non-alcoholic wine brand produced by Katja and Patrick Bernegger of Heribert Bayer in Austria, the process for their flagship non-alcoholic red wine starts with their highest-quality wine. “We took our best wine and dealcoholized it,” says Katja Bernegger. “It has two years in new oak. It comes from 70-year-old vineyards, so you have a lot of complexity in the grapes. There are no compromises in the vinification of the wine.”
However, because the balance of the wine changes with dealcoholization, the Berneggers had to adjust their strategy to reach the desired quality level. They decided to further investigate exactly how their base wine was impacted by dealcoholization.
“We detected that the primary fruit is the component that is the most changed when you dealcoholize [a red wine],” says Katja Bernegger. “We also saw that secondary and tertiary aromas are nearly the same. We thought, ‘how cool would it be if we could transform those aging flavors into non-alcoholic wine?’ We did a test dealcoholization [of 20-year-old red wine] and saw that it was so close to the real thing.”
But, Patrick Bernegger notes, “It was two years in the barrel, and another 18 years in the bottle,” so the tannins had plenty of time to mellow. And thanks to the concentration of acidity, Patrick Bernegger says the dealcoholized aged wine tastes fresher than the full-strength version.
The Future of Non-Alcoholic Wine Research
While non-alcoholic winemaking stretches back more than 100 years, it’s still in the early stages of development. Many non-alcoholic winemakers don’t feel they have mastered the category. In fact, they are very open about the ongoing learning process.
“This is a learning process, and we are looking forward to every new vintage to bring in my ideas and learnings from the past vintage,” says Patrick Bernegger.
Taittinger and his wife Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger, who cofounded French Bloom, have been working on research and development for more than four years with an eye for continual improvement. Their latest innovation, which took several years to get right, aimed at creating an alcohol-free sparkling wine akin to a vintage Champagne.
“We wanted to try and capture a wine that was reminiscent of a vintage sparkling wine at its peak maturity,” says Frerejean-Taittinger. “For us, peak maturity is 20 or 25 years old. So that was what we attempted to do with the 2022 [La Cuvée Vintage].” Instead of aging the wine bottle, which is not an option for most non-alcoholic wines, they tweaked the base wine. “You have an opulent nose that is extremely rich, like a much older vintage. And then on the palate, we tried to bring out those oxidative notes that you’d find in a well-aged sparkling wine,” adds Frerejean-Taittinger.
But the learning and development won’t end there. “We are finalizing the acquisition of a beautiful wine estate with 20 hectares in Limoux because we really want to have a temple for what we’re doing,” says Taittinger. “This place will be the first alcohol-free wine estate that’s 100 percent dedicated to what we’re doing.”
With more winemakers dedicated to increasing the quality of non-alcoholic wine through research and development, this has become one of the most exciting categories in the industry—and the potential is limitless.