TN: NV Oddbird Saint-Chinian GSM ("Liberated from Alcohol")

[Sam_Kwak]

I present to you, ladies and gentleman, a tasting note born of desperation in the heart of dry January.

My wife and I were walking down a supermarket aisle on the way to the check-out when this caught our eye. I flinched momentarily at the $25 price tag, but the label held out a glimmer of hope that it could perhaps be the answer to my prayers for a palatable substitute for red wine. I mean, it even mentions the grape varieties, farmed in Saint-Chinian! After all, a few non-alcoholic beers have managed to become quite convincing substitutes of the real thing, so could not wine…?

On the nose, not off to a great start. Grapey, not fresh grapes but pruney and a little cooked, and a little bit of tobacco. I’m not talking cigar box. I mean printer paper and cheap tobacco, like unlit Camel Lights.

It makes an equally uninspiring entry on the palate. Definitely residual sugar (label confirms 4g/100ml, or 40g/l) - this is off-dry even though the website claims it’s a dry red wine. It tastes less like wine from which alcohol was eliminated than it does like prune juice from which 2/3 of the sugar had been removed. I can faintly make out the outline of some tannins that are bitter and gritty like black tea that’s been steeped too long, and its saving grace is that there isn’t a lot of it. There’s a short tobacco and black tea finish. Consumed together with a ribeye steak to test whether it can indeed perform in place of a red wine, I find it doesn’t have the sort of body or acidity to achieve any meaningful synergy with the meat.

With air time, the tobacco smell fades a bit and it’s predominantly just prune now.

“Well, just think of it as grape juice,” my wife said, trying to console me. The thing is, it isn’t even good grape juice. Welch’s is better at being grape juice for 1/10 of the price. Maybe there is decent NA wine somewhere but this ain’t it. I’m a tiny bit curious what the underlying de-alcoholized wine tasted like before the addition of grape must concentrate as indicated on the label which may have taken it too much in the juice direction. But not dying to know.

[Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r]

@Sam_Kwak

It makes an equally uninspiring entry on the palate. Definitely residual sugar (label confirms 4g/100ml, or 40g/l) - this is off-dry even though the website claims it’s a dry red wine. It tastes less like wine from which alcohol was eliminated than it does like prune juice from which 2/3 of the sugar had been removed

Unfortunately this problem is ubiquitous in the non-alcoholic wine world - they decided that 40 g/L sugar was what you needed to get some weight back from the lost alcohol, and everyone ran with it. It makes no sense to me for reds, which read super weird with that much sugar. Personally I would rather have a thinner wine that doesn’t have a phony off-dry character. Back when I worked on NA wine we did produce a few with less than 10 g/L, which felt more authentic to me, and the US market has been more interested in this than the Europeans, so far. Things are getting better but it’s slow.

[Sam_Kwak]

@Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r - huh that’s interesting to know. In my mind it would have made more sense to add glycerol instead of sugar to give NA wine body if that’s the goal. In any case, since you seem to have more experience with NA wine, is there one that’s worth seeking out in your opinion?

[Otto_Forsberg]

@Sam_Kwak

In my mind it would have made more sense to add glycerol instead of sugar to give NA wine body

Then they wouldn’t be allowed to call it de-alcoholized wine. If they aren’t allowed to add glycerol to a wine, they aren’t allowed to add any to a NA wine, either.

[Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r]

@Sam_Kwak

@Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r - huh that’s interesting to know. In my mind it would have made more sense to add glycerol instead of sugar to give NA wine body if that’s the goal. In any case, since you seem to have more experience with NA wine, is there one that’s worth seeking out in your opinion?

A lot of people did in the past. In the EU in recent years there has been a lot more regulatory scrutiny on ingredients and definitions to be able to call things wine. I am not 100% up to date on the EU regulations there, but I don’t really see glycerol in ingredient lists anymore. Otto, it sounds like you might know more about the current regulatory status? It’s still the Wild West here in the U.S. - from a regulatory perspective it’s just a non-alcoholic beverage and you can add all kinds of things.

It used to be (say, 5 years ago), that glycerol was popular in the EU, and propylene glycol was popular in the US, but even without regulatory changes pretty much everyone has moved away from both of those, either for labeling or quality reasons. I never liked PG or glycerol because I think it they make wine feel gloopy - it’s the wrong kind of weight.

I’ve seen a lot of lot-to-lot variability in non-alcoholic wine, partly because some NA wines use bulk wine as the base, so it depends on how good the bulk lot was that they could get, and partly depending on how well it was handled during dealcoholization, formulation, and packaging. Plus you want something that was packaged as recently as possible, which is hard to guarantee as a consumer.

I think the Leitz Eins Zwei Drei sparkling Riesling is one of the better productions out there. It’s lightweight and a touch sweet but, when you get a good bottle, it’s not phony.

There are some good products that are annoyingly in cans for marketing reasons, which generally means the shelf life is awful and they stop tasting like they’re supposed to in 3-6 months.

In Europe, the best wines are made using a new generation of aroma recovery technology to preserve the aromas normally lost during dealcoholization (This tech isn’t operating yet in the US but will be in the next year or so). Bergdolt Reif & Nett are pioneers, I think. Their Pinot Blanc and Gewurz in particular are wine-like. Too sweet, but they smell and taste good. The last lot of the Gewurz that I tasted seemed like it had oxidation problems during processing and was totally shot across multiple bottles, but when it’s on it’s on. Also in Europe, Moderato makes a Merlot-Tannat blend that is one of the first NA reds I’ve had that tastes authentically like red wine. It’s not my favorite but I do think it tastes “correct”. There is a producer out of Austria called Zeronimo that is getting a lot of hype for a non-alcoholic red wine called “Leonis”, which they are selling for $38/375mL (eek!). I have to say, unfortunately, that I think a big reason it tastes like wine is that it is super Bretty, and the volatile phenols responsible for Brett character survive dealcoholization very well. I haven’t tasted it since about a year ago so it may be that the latest vintage is less bretty, and some people like Brett, so for them it might be a good bet.

[Dan_Sch]

Navarro GW juice is delicious and wonderful and NA