The Wine Gourd: Try blending your non-alcohol wines, if you want to make them more drinkable

I have recently written a few posts about wine and its affect on our health, such as:

None of these posts finds a great deal of issue with consuming wine, provided that it is done responsibly. Intoxication is not the point of the exercise. Indeed, it has been argued that We don’t drink wine just for intoxication (Patrick Schmitt), because “looking at only the public health and intoxication issues of alcohol misses one of the main reasons why we drink it: nothing can match wine’s ability to enhance both food and mood.”

Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing market for people who want to replace their (proper) wine for a non-alcohol version. So, it is a topic worth looking at in this blog. Here is a graph showing us what some (self-selected) people did during last month, to avoid consuming alcohol. Note that about one-fifth of them chose a non-alcohol beverage.

I will start by saying that it seems to me to be very easy to argue that “no-alcohol wine” is a contradiction in terms — wine, by definition, has alcohol in it, just as does beer, and scotch whiskey. That is, dictionary definitions usually specify that wine is the alcoholic product of fermented grapes (or other fruits, although these are often termed cider).

Indeed, I am not alone in thinking that Zero alcohol wine is not wine (Huon Hooke):

I have been diligently tasting the zero alcohol ‘wines’ that breathless PR people send me, and those that I buy off the supermarket shelves out of my own curiosity, but I have yet to find a red wine that tastes anything like wine. I have tasted one or two whites that had some appeal ... but on the whole they are seriously disappointing. They are no more an alcohol-free substitute for wine than any other soft drink or fruit juice.

In one tasting of 16 samples, I noted the residual sugar content of these beverages ranged between 25 and 45 grams per litre. And some confessed they contained ‘flavourings’ and ‘thickeners’. Sugar is evidently used in a vain effort to inject palate weight and flavour.

It is worth noting that non-alcohol wines are first made as normal (alcohol-containing) wines, and the alcohol is then removed, often by a more-or-less aggressive method of de-alcoholisation, such as centrifugal separation (eg. spinning cone) or reverse osmosis (see The challenges of making low/no alcohol wine). The result is then “adjusted” in order to make it drinkable, and hence the additives cited above. People are still working on gentler methods (eg. vacuum distillation), in an attempt to preserve some more of the key aroma and flavour compounds (eg. How Oddbird alcohol-free wines are revolutionising the No/Lo market).

So, I decided to check this out for myself, and recently got together with a few relatives and neighbors to try some wines: 4 non-alcohol whites, 4 non-alcohol reds, 2 non-alcohol sparkling, and a couple of alcohol-containing wines for comparison. * This isn't a wine review, so I won’t give any tasting notes, but I can note the overall results.

The wines were all fairly inexpensive ($5.60 to $10.30 per standard bottle), but they cost enough to potentially taste like wine. Here they are listed by increasing price within each group:

Non-alcohol whites

Hardy’s Zero Chardonnay 2022
Leitz Eins Zwei Zero Riesling 2022
Edenvale Pinot Gris
Zeno Alcohol-Liberated White 20222

Alcohol white

Hardy’s Nottage Hill Chardonnay 2022 (bag-in-box)

Non-alcohol reds

Rawson’s Retreat Cabernet Sauvignon
Oddbird Domaine de la Prade (Merlot & Shiraz)
Edenvale Premium Reserve Pinot Noir
Oddbird Grenache Shiraz Mouvèdre (Carignan)

Alcohol red

Rawson’s Retreat Cabernet Sauvignon 2021

Non-alcohol sparkling

Oddbird Veneto Spumante Rosé
Thomson & Scott Noughty Sparkling Chardonnay

To put it bluntly, of the non-alcohol wines only the sparkling ones tasted like anything other than fruit juice. Sweetness was a recurring theme, as also suggested by Huon Hooke above. The Oddbird wines did not taste any better, in spite of their hype. The alcohol-containing wines tasted perfectly nice.

Since I was unimpressed, I tried some experiments. First, I mixed the alcohol and non-alcohol versions of the same producer/type (ie. the two Hardy’s whites, and the two Rawson’s Retreat reds). The results tasted like a low-alcohol wine, which was certainly an improvement (eg. it reduced the sweetness). I then mixed the other three non-alcohol wines of each type together (ie. the three whites, and the three reds). The resulting complexity increased greatly, and they were no longer just fruit juice. As suggested by this post’s title, this is what I would do if I was to make a habit of drinking non-alcohol wines — buy several and blend them.

So, do yourself a favor — if you want to replace your wine at any time, do it with some other drink, as wine really does need alcohol in order to be wine. If you want to reduce your alcohol intake, then choose wines that are made naturally lower in alcohol, in the first place (eg. originating in a cool climate).

Looking at the bigger picture, alcohol is not the only cultural thing with potential negative side effects. After all, there's inherent risk in almost all human activities. For example, cars can have a very bad effect on people (as can trains), because many people die every week, and their exhausts create air pollution. However, we have not banned cars, but we have instead tried to reduce their negative effects. The same logic applies to alcohol, which can have both positive and negative effects (eg. alcoholism). So, alcohol can exist in the same world with people, provided that it is used responsibly.

Part of the issue here seems to be younger people, who are the people most influenced by the anti-alcohol media (SVB State of the US Wine Industry Report 2024). It has been noted (Results of Consumer Survey on U.S. Wine Market Trends and Challenges) that:

The reported participation in “Dry January” or “Sober October” in 2023 was highest among respondents in the ages 21–39 segment, with over half of the cohort reporting participation by cutting back their wine consumption in those months or abstaining from wine altogether. Nearly two-thirds of the same age group indicated they intend to participate in one or both of these events in 2024.

If you want to read further on the subject, then here are some useful links:

* Some of them were chosen from among the following lists: