Is alcohol-free wine really wine? And does it taste good?
Most wine lovers shudder at the very mention of it. Alcohol-free wine, brrr! Or as wine writer Harold Hamersma put it: “It’s like having sex with an inflatable doll.” But the figures don’t lie: over the past six months, the alcohol-free wine market has grown by 50 percent. What exactly is alcohol-free wine? Is it an option if you’re taking part in Dry January? I delved into it for you. It wasn’t necessarily fun, but it was educational. Make the most of it!
Not grape juice
Let’s start at the beginning: to make alcohol-free wine, you first have to make wine. The major difference between grape juice and alcohol-free wine is the fermentation process. Fermenting the must (that’s freshly pressed but not yet fermented juice) produces not only alcohol, but also lots of flavours that you don’t find in grape juice. Alcohol-free wine is therefore fermented wine (and thus does contain alcohol), after which a process takes place to remove the alcohol from the wine. So to make alcohol-free wine, you need an alcoholic wine.
And then?
Removing alcohol from wine can be done using various methods, ranging from vacuum distillation to reverse osmosis (microfiltration). My sincere apologies in advance if this article feels like an utterly boring chemistry class that you—be honest—only looked forward to because you wanted to drink pure alcohol (yes, my teenage years were rough). Thanks to these state of the art technologies, alcohol can be removed with surgical precision. But does alcohol-free wine taste good? That largely depends on the quality of the base wine. And actually, it should be called low-alcohol wine, because a small amount, somewhere between 0.5% and 0.01%, always remains.
Full of flavour
Not every wine is suitable for dealcoholisation. Because a mediocre wine becomes an even more mediocre alcohol-free wine. Alcohol carries flavour, so when you lose the alcohol, you also lose flavour. This is precisely why it’s so damn difficult to find really good alcohol-free wine—yes, I’m speaking from years of particularly disappointing experience. Without the alcohol, the base wine needs to be full of flavour, with good acidity and good structure. During dealcoholisation, you lose around 15% in volume (the alcohol and a little water), but the acidity remains. It therefore makes up a larger proportion of the final product, making it a challenge to find full-bodied base wines with low acidity. A white wine with high acidity will become even more acidic and leaner when the alcohol is removed.
Colour is also important, because concentrating the wine makes it darker. For red wines, you also need a fruity example with few tannins. If, for example, you stripped a heavy, tannic red wine of its alcohol, the remaining product would be a harsh, bitter drink.
Bubbles are best
The lack of alcohol is also often compensated for by adding sugar and carbon dioxide. Of all the alcohol-free wines I’ve tasted over the past few years, sparkling wines have been the clear, positive standouts. Not only does sugar help you forget the alcohol, but carbon dioxide does too. The alcohol-free Raumland I recently drank at Michelin-starred restaurant The White Room was actually really good.
Don’t
I don’t do Dry January or Sober October myself (with this job, how could I?!), but I wholeheartedly support anyone who has made this brave decision. Alcohol isn’t healthy, and in some circles (the football club, Friday afternoon drinks at the office, the neighbourhood drinks gathering, to name a few) it also takes quite a bit of backbone to say that you don’t drink. The initial reactions are often comparable to your first divorce: disbelief and astonishment. Followed by derisive laughter. Screw that. It’s your life. Open that bottle. But don’t do this: smell it. It doesn’t have the seductive aroma that characterises wine so well. Alcohol-free wine often smells flat and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the flavour you subsequently taste. It’s therefore not (really) wine anymore, so you shouldn’t compare it with wine either. If you do compare, compare the calorie count: a glass of alcohol-free wine contains fewer than 25 calories, unlike a glass of regular wine, which quickly contains 75. Do the maths.
In the articles below, those in the know share some great buying tips. Santé!
Read also:
- These are the favourite alcohol-free wines of top sommeliers
- This sparkling wine fizzes like champagne, tastes like prosecco and is alcohol-free
- This will be the first alcohol-free bar in the Netherlands
