Yes, we have tried maybe 10 different reds and they all taste like lemonade… Nothing really stands out.
But non-alcoholic Riesling and especially the sparkling ones from Leitz and Dr. Loosen are actually really enjoyable.
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As also mentioned in my comment above, Leitz and Dr. Loosen (called “The Teetotaler” here) both make a sparkling Riesling that, in Denmark, cost about €10. My pregnant girlfriend enjoys them although they will of course never be the same as Champagne.
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Both the still and sparkling Loosen are available around here. I might get them just to satisfy my curiosity. Thanks both of you for the suggestion.
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Please report back!
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it’s called Riesling. They make it as low as 8%
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Zeero, a creation from Marco Salvadori. Sangiovese that’s full-flavored, well-balanced and suits my palate quite well. If it was easy to source, I’d drink it multiple times per week. Delicious, affordable and easy to approach, this is consistently the best of the dozen+ I’ve tried.
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funny how 90% of the time someone describes a wine as ‘well-balanced’, it’s just an indicia that it’s actually not. like if you have to say it, it’s probably not the case.
From one of my distributors no-alcohol wines were the absolute bee’s knees about 1-2 years ago. They couldn’t keep it in stock. Now when I speak to the reps, I get a sense it’s not the land of enchantement any longer and demand has moderated. That said, I did taste some of the better ones at a tasting recently and I have to say they’ve improved a lot from how they used to taste.
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I wonder what it would be like to use that method on a red.
Like say you had what would be a13% good Bourgogne or Beaujolais , but you stopped the fermentation and sterile filtered so you had 8% alcohol.
What would it taste like?
I guess a red without 40% the fermentation would be lighter color and body? But the RS would taste sweeter?
Doesn’t sound awesome when I put it like that.
Would a different variety or ripeness be better?
Now available in “Twist & Go”.
thank you for giving me some insight here. May you live forever.
closed.
The Leitz Eins Zwei Dry Pinot Noir is quite good. (I use it to bring my Spätburgunder under 10% without altering the flavor.)
IMHO, this is exactly the problem. The industry has taken an “all or nothing” approach. There are plenty of people out there, like myself, that can have some alcohol. A selection of good dry wines, around 5-7%, would likely sell incredibly well. And most of the character of the wine would be retained since you’re not trying to get out every drop of alcohol.
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Doing this is the “trad” solution with a long long history – the Greeks and Romans typically watered down their wines to make long drinking sessions more practical. Drinking undiluted wine was indicative of lacking self-control and being an alcoholic. No doubt their winemaking was adapted to make the wine taste good with an admixture of water.
But given that just a few decades ago winemakers easily and routinely made red wines at 12% alcohol or even less that are now hailed as among the greatest wines of the past century, I have to think there are winemaking practices short of outright watering down wines that could significantly reduce alcohol in the final product. From 14.5% to 11.5% is a reduction of more than a fifth in alcohol. And please don’t give the lazy answer that “global warming” makes this impossible, hot days existed in the 1970s and 1980s too!
@Marcus_Goodfellow has made this one of his career goals and been quite successful at it.
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Good post - and great concepts indeed.
I will say that winemakers, in general, tend to pick grapes when they taste ‘ripe’ - and this is gonna generally be at higher brix than, say, 30 years ago.
Also, rootstocks and clones are ‘more efficient’ now than 30 years ago, and the increased use of VSP trellising (vertical shoot positioning) has led to increased ripeness as well.
Cheers
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I will echo what seems to be the consensus, in that it theoretically would be nice to have a low alcohol wine if everything were the same, but that seems to be impossible at the moment at least.
More philosophically, I enjoy wines for being “genuine” reflections of the grape, the vintage, the winemaker’s style, etc…the minute it feels like the wine is a manufactured product, which I think a non alcoholic wine would have to be, I am not interested. Of course I like the taste of wine, but I am personally drinking as much for the story as the flavor of what’s in the glass. I’m fine just drinking water otherwise.
There are plenty of negatives of alcohol, but personally the main reason I am drinking less is the # of calories in wine. If I drink 2/3 of a bottle of wine, that’s probably 400-450 calories. It’s difficult to regularly fit in an extra 400+ calories that have no nutritional content in your day. Presumably zero alcohol wine would have fewer calories as long as the alcohol isn’t replaced by more residual sugar, but it would still be quite high in calories I assume and probably not be satisfying intellectually or in terms of the flavor profile, so I’d pass on it.
Nobody should be using the word “impossible” anymore, especially in the context of wine.
Explain what you are suggesting is possible here, if you don’t mind.