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.
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 Technologydeveloped 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.”
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