The Broken Promise of Nonalcoholic Wine
The past decade has not been kind to those of us who enjoy a proper glass of wine with dinner. If the ascendance of Dry January and Sober October, with their attendant “detox” opprobrium, wasn’t intimidating enough, we witnessed the creep of “healthy” or “skinny” low-sugar wine, meant to play nice with the keto lifestyle. Some even advocated the wholesale replacement of wine with kombucha, the fermented tea that adds probiotics to your gut but little in the way of enjoyment to your evening. The insults to oenophiles have been many—but friends, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Talk to wine marketers and consultants, and the next big thing is nonalcoholic wine. It will save the wine business, they assure us, from the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a flock of studies that slapped our daily glasses of red from our hands because no amount of alcohol is safe to drink. It will make wine cool again with health-conscious young people, who apparently view the venerable beverage as if it were something that only their parents and grandparents could love. And it will rejuvenate grape growing at a time when vineyards around the world are being ripped out in the face of a 15-year drop in demand. These evangelists even have all sorts of numbers and factoids to wave around—sales of NA wine, as it’s known in the trade, were up nearly 25 percent between 2021 and 2022, while the number of young people who drink alcohol dropped by almost 14 percent in the past two decades.
This is all well and good for those who like to throw percentages around, but it has very little to do with wine: its history and role in our culture, why we drink it, and why we—yes—enjoy it. With apologies to everyone rushing to making NA wine “a thing,” I must inform you that it is a bizarre contradiction in terms. Wine can’t be nonalcoholic, since the alcohol is its reason for being—and I’m not just saying that as someone who enjoys wine. If it is nonalcoholic, it’s just weird grape juice, and badly tasting weird grape juice at that.
The first thing to understand about nonalcoholic wine is that the three most common methods are each elaborate and arguably unnecessary industrial processes, with all that entails in time and cost and equipment. In other words, not exactly what the planet needs as we spiral from one climate change crisis to the next. Two of the methods—vacuum distillation and reverse osmosis—require, among other things, heating the grape juice to almost body temperature. The third, and perhaps the most common method, is called spinning, in which the liquid is sent down a vertical series of spinning cones. As the liquid goes down the cones, the spinning motion separates the liquid from the different components, including the alcohol.
Why is there alcohol there in the first place, you may ask? Because each process requires that wine grapes be fermented and turned into actual wine first. Only then can the alcohol be removed to produce NA wine. Didn’t I warn you about the contradictions?
The second thing to understand? Almost all of a wine’s flavor and character and mouthfeel comes from the alcohol—and replicating that sensation requires some troubling trade-offs. All the tasty aspects of wine are the result of fermentation, which turns the sugar in the grapes into alcohol. Take the alcohol out, and the result is a wine-style liquid that is more than grape juice but not quite wine. It’s bland at best and bitter and off-putting at worst (and yes, I’ve tasted entirely too many), and those are just the whites. It’s even more difficult to make NA red wine, since reds are generally heavier in the mouth and have more alcohol to take out and more flavor to replace.
The technical explanation for all of this has to do with esters, the compounds that give wine its flavor and aroma and that are present in the alcohol after fermentation—so, of course, they mostly go away when the alcohol is removed. With the esters missing, producers need to add ingredients to the NA wine to give it flavor and mouthfeel. That includes sugar for flavor and glycerol, a viscous liquid you might recognize from shaving cream and toothpaste, to replicate the mouthfeel.
And how much sugar, one of the four horsemen of the American diet apocalypse (along with salt, fat, and cholesterol)? It depends on the wine style and the grape used, but New Zealand’s Giesen, one of the world’s biggest NA wine producers, makes a nonalcoholic riesling that has 22 grams of sugar per serving. That’s about one-third more per serving than a traditional riesling. This isn’t necessarily any less “healthy” in my opinion, but it is ironic.
None of this complication should be surprising. Wine exists because of fermentation, because of the alcohol; it made wine safe to drink in the several thousand years before industrialization and modern food preservation methods like pasteurization. Wine geeks like to wax poetic about the ancient Romans and Greeks and their love of wine, but they drank wine for a much more practical reason than getting drunk. It was safer than the dirty water that was ubiquitous in preindustrial society and could be responsible for cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. True, our water is generally potable these days, but giving up a glass of chilled rosé on a warm summer afternoon just because water is safe to drink doesn’t seem to be the solution, either.
Be assured that this isn’t an argument for getting blasted or imbibing if you really shouldn’t or don’t want to, nor is it to suggest that moderation is a bad idea. Rather, as California winemaker Jon McPherson so wryly puts it, “Moderation isn’t complicated. It’s club soda with a lime twist.” So how did we get to the point where taking it easy with our drinking, in the form of NA wine, relies on this obscene amount of technology and manufacturing?
Chalk it up to the American fascination with easy solutions, made possible through science, for problems that would otherwise make our brains hurt. If we can wean ourselves off full-sugar drinks with saccharin and aspartame, or convince ourselves that eating an elaborately constructed meatless hamburger is the key to heart health, why not drink wine that doesn’t have any alcohol? We’ll live forever, won’t we? That it would be simpler to limit soft drinks or to cut down on beef doesn’t seem to matter. Where’s the fun in that?
Interestingly, a quixotic thirst for longevity may be at least part of the NA wine trend. Jeff Slankard, the wine and beer director for Barons Market, an upscale grocer in Southern California, reports that his two stores that sell the most NA wine have the oldest average customer age. “I was not expecting that,” he says, “since everyone is talking about the 35-and-unders drinking less alcohol. It does make sense, though. Our older customers are very health conscious.”
One final contradiction: No one, in any of the marketing literature for NA wine, claims that the stuff is actually better for us than real wine. Yes, it has fewer calories and no alcohol (dubious measures of healthiness, especially out of context), but anything beyond those limited points would run afoul of federal regulations. To claim broader benefits would require scientific studies and developing guidelines based on those studies. This is a process usually reserved for blockbuster drugs, not something to drink with dinner. Would that consumers understood that NA wine is not medicine.
The true believers will scoff at this, being true believers, but it’s possible to drink real wine, get low alcohol, and enjoy what you’re drinking. Hundreds and hundreds of options exist, and they have for years—and learning about them is as simple as a Google search. Know, too, that the amount of alcohol is listed on every bottle by law, so finding low-alcohol wines does not require a degree in winemaking. Most vinho verdes, a Portuguese white, are 9 percent alcohol or less. Riesling can be as low as 6 percent, and it’s even sweet for those who appreciate that. I drink rosés and whites from southwestern France, and the alcohol is about 10 percent. No, none of those are zero, but most of the wines in that list have close to one-third less alcohol than the typical California red. And best of all, they taste like wine and can be drunk with as much moderation as you please.
Finally, a little perspective: Aaron E. Carroll, who teaches at the Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote in an assessment of alcohol science that “15 desserts a day would be bad for you. This could lead to assertions that ‘there’s no safe amount of dessert.’ But it doesn’t mean you should never, ever eat dessert.” As it is with whipped cream, so let it be with wine.
