Germany’s success in non-alcoholic wine is no coincidence: years of tradition and intense experimentation have turned out a bevy of innovative non-alcoholic winemakers.
When Maria Jung set out to make customary sales calls for her family’s wine estate, she did not expect to be met with refusals. But she returned home to report a disappointing drop in purchases among regular customers. They were, they had told her, avoiding alcohol for health reasons. Jung considered the problem. She proposed that the family try an experiment. Why not dealcoholize their wines in the distillery they also operated? Within a few years, the estate was making the world’s first non-alcoholic wines under a patented process.
This is not, however, the story of an innovative winery responding to modern wellness culture. The year was 1900, and the place was Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany.
That very early adoption is now paying off. Today, some 100 German wineries, from co-ops to international flagships, offer non-alcoholic wines of increasingly impressive quality. One is Weingut Leitz, the U.S. market leader in this category, which sends its wines to be dealcoholized just a few kilometers down the road—to Maria Jung’s great-grandson.
While many producers and industry experts believe these are still early days in the development of quality dealcoholized wines, dedicated researchers at Geisenheim, Germany’s top wine university, have been working on alcohol reduction in wine for at least 40 years. Some German producers have spent years selecting varieties and optimizing processes to deliver a premium product. A recent step up in quality stems from producers paying closer attention to the condition of their base wines and from experiential and technological breakthroughs that are noticeable in the latest vintages. Germany is also gaining considerable sophistication in the fast-evolving field of flavor capture and add-back.
Although the German non-alcoholic wine landscape was long dominated by mass-market products, today Germany’s top producers—among them Georg Breuer, Selbach-Oster, Weingut Dr. Loosen, Weingut Bibo Runge, and Weingut Leitz—are lending their names to quality dealcoholized wines. The push towards premiumization is now palpable in export markets as well.
A long history of dealcoholisation
“In Germany, the topic of dealcoholized wine is not brand new,” notes Matthias Schmitt, Ph.D, a researcher at Geisenheim. However, Bernhard Jung, now managing director of Carl Jung, one of Germany’s leading wine dealcoholizers, explains that when his great-grandmother Maria prompted the family to start experimenting with dealcoholization around the turn of the last century, it wasn’t an immediate success.
Removing alcohol from wine requires very high temperatures, which strip out aromas and flavors. “My grandfather, Dr. Carl Jung, read about expeditions to the Himalayas,” explains Jung. “Water boils at 70 degrees Celsius at those elevations, not at 100 degrees Celsius, as it does closer to sea level. That gave him the idea to try distillation under vacuum, to lower the boiling point.” This would allow for the extraction of ethanol with less loss of volatile aromatic compounds. Dr. Jung wasn’t an engineer, so he commissioned the construction of a vacuum pump that could be attached to his distiller. This proved to be the critical step. He patented the process, known today as the vacuum distillation method, in Germany in 1907, with the U.S. patent following a year later.
The German market for non-alcoholic wines developed slowly at first, says Jung. The first breakthrough came in the 1920s, with exports to the U.S. during Prohibition. There was further interest from countries where alcohol was either expensive or there was a steep cost to driving while intoxicated. About 20 years ago, the Carl Jung company decided there was enough demand to specialize solely in dealcoholization, both for its own label and as a contract dealcoholizer. That specialization has helped it meet the boom in non-alcoholic beverages of the past five or six years, especially during the pandemic, when health concerns spiked.
Why Germany?
“The easiest answer to why Germany leads the non-alcoholic wine category is so stereotyped that I hesitate to name it,” says Frank Schulz, the communications director at the German Wine Institute. But he does: “Technology. German entrepreneurs have always been good at that.”
But there are other key factors, too. The first is beer. In the 1980s and ’90s, when German brewers introduced non-alcoholic options, they were poorly received. But when brewers started to take the category seriously and develop higher quality products, consumers began to embrace them. Now, dealcoholized beer represents more than 10 percent of the German beer market and is steadily growing. “That may be a kind of proof-of-concept that can benefit the wine industry,” suggests Dr. Schmitt.
Equally important to the success of German nonalcoholic wines are the grape varieties and wine styles that are at home in Germany. Riesling, Müller-Thurgau, Gewürztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat varieties, and some hybrids all have high concentrations of complex aromatics that can survive the aroma-stripping process of dealcoholization.
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