Transcript:
Non-Alcoholic Wine
Hello, bonjour, and welcome to your new Bonner Private Wines video. Today, I want to talk to you about something else than wine, which is probably going to be the first time for me here. I’ve always talked about wine here. What is going on, Julien? Today I want to talk to you about nonalcoholic or alcohol free wine. You are going to be talking about wine in the end.
Is non-alcoholic wine an actual wine? And is it any good? Let’s find out.
Grape Juice “Preparations”
There are quite a number of different brands and different products of nonalcoholic wines or preparations based more or less on wine. It’s often hard to know exactly how they’re made as well, because producers don’t necessarily communicate and explain very well how those products are made and what’s the process behind them. So it can be even more complicated for me to discuss everything for every manufacturer.
But let’s try and keep it simple here, as usual. Some nonalcoholic beverages that your local wine shop owner might sell you as nonalcoholic wine are in fact more like grape juice, meaning not fermented.
They might add some aromas or other things herbs, flavors, oils, or remove or add some sugar or add some acids, for example. But at the end of the day, those are certainly not wine, since to have wine you really need not only the sugars transformed into alcohol by the yeast, but also this huge aromatic transformation that takes place during fermentation when yeast release a whole lot of fermentation aromas and flavors in the liquid. Not only alcohol. So you might find some Pinot noir or chardonnay grape juices or other thoughts of marketing products based on essentially grape juice, but not wine.
Those are usually going to be quite good for what they are. Grape juice, so quite sweet. And without the distinctive flavors, the typical savoriness, savory feel, of a wine.
Alcohol-Removed “Wines”
Then there are alcohol free products that are made by first fermenting the grape juice, therefore making an actual wine and then removing the alcohol from it afterwards. I don’t want to be too technical here, but if you’re wondering, there are two ways to remove alcohol from a wine.
The first one is called reverse osmosis, which is some type of advanced filtration where you apply high pressure to a wine and you essentially force the wine through the alcohol, through a membrane, a specific membrane that only allows alcohol through and not much else. So you push on the wine on one side and only the alcohol goes through the membrane.
So you end up with a wine without the alcohol. The other method is through what’s called vacuum distillation, where you boil a wine but at low temperature by putting it under the vacuum, very low pressure. Therefore, on the surface of the wine to evaporate the alcohol, but without any hot temperature. So without cooking the liquid here you evaporate a lot of aromas as well as the alcohol.
So you have to then distill your alcohol afterwards with all the aromas and put all the flavors back in your initial product. It’s a little complicated. Those are technically legally not classified as wine, because wine has legally officially a certain percentage of alcohol. But you can see how they can be marketed, sold as nonalcoholic wines because they are made from fermented grape juice.
But then is what you get out of these, let’s say, industry industrial processes, because, you know, it takes quite a lot of technical in technology to make them all those any good. And do they really taste like wine at the end of the day? Let’s discuss.
Are Alcohol-Free Wines Any Good?
The short answer is no, They don’t taste much like wine. You see a lot of the aromas found in wine dissolved by the alcohol in it. They are quite a hydrophobic. They don’t those aromas don’t like water. They can’t be dissolved in water very well. So if you remove the alcohol, you remove a lot of these flavors as well.
And you can try as hard as you can, as you want to add them back with other distillations and technical optical things, eventually you can’t really do it because of physics or chemistry. You physically can’t have those flavors in the wine without the alcohol. Like you can’t have a car propelled by its wheels fly even if you probably set wings on it, because as soon as it takes off, it leaves the ground and it can’t propel itself and it’s going to crash back down physics.
The alcohol also plays a major role in the texture of wine, its taste. Alcohol is oily, it’s quite sweet too. So it participates in the whole balance, the whole harmony over wine that I talk about here. When you have good wines, there’s this impossible to recreate harmony that a wine has that you can’t recreate very exactly the same without alcohol.
So it’s not to say that a nonalcoholic wine cannot taste okay, if not good, perhaps for some brands, but it just can’t taste like actual wine. There are certainly health benefits to less alcohol intake. What I also find is what you lose is the connection I enjoy so much in wine with the vineyard, with the land. The grapes were grown on the terroir that I talk about when I talk about wines, because all these technological processes, the liquid has to go through.
You also lose the poetry. I would say the soul that wine has that comes from the fact that its flavors, its harmony is not all it has. The alcohol level that it has, it has the flavors that it has all its features because of the heat that there was that year in the area. One year it’s huge heat.
So it’s a big, huge, jammy wine. Another year it’s going to be cooler and more subtle and you can’t replace that connection, I find. I’ll finish by saying that during the 20 plus years I’ve been observing wine closely, I’ve had in the back of my mind the thought that we will get there someday. We will make a great wine that tastes like wine, but without the alcohol.
I thought the technology would get there and yet it still hasn’t done it in now the year 2020 as well. I’ve realized now that it’s just not really possible. They’ve done it with beer quite well since 20 years ago. Nonalcoholic beers weren’t really a thing making 0% alcohol. Beer that tastes like the real thing is a reality now.
But beer started with 5% alcohol, not 13% alcohol. That’s a lot harder to emulate, right? And remove 13% of a product like wine that it’s difficult on top of that, beer gets added a lot of its flavors during the process. While wine has its flavors from the grapes and the fermentation itself, beers get, lots of hops are added to it, so it’s a lot easier to reproduce that flavor.
Wine in wine, a lot of the flavors, as I said, are carried by the alcohol itself in a large part. And so I’m older now. I’m less interested in the effects of alcohol than I was at 20. But I’m afraid you can’t really drink wine without drinking wine. And that means having a little alcohol. So you just have to have less of it, I guess.
On this final note, I’ll leave it here for today and we’ll see you soon in the wonderful world of vino. Cheers.
