Non-alcoholic beverages overall experienced 22 percent growth year-over-year, according to a recent NielsenIQ (NIQ) analysis, reaching $925 million in off-premise sales. For many, switching to a no- or low-alcohol wine, beer, or spirit does not preclude enjoying alcohol on other occasions—about 92 percent of non-alcoholic beverage buyers still purchase alcohol, NIQ reports.
Given this overwhelmingly inclusive approach to beverage consumption, led often by occasion-based preference, many producers no longer see non-alcoholic wine as a threat. This expansionary approach to how wine is defined and consumed is also shaping how no- and low-alcohol products are made.
But welcoming innovation and expansion doesn’t mean that the no- and low-alcohol category meets the current market’s desires. Historically, the biggest challenge both producers and consumers of no- and low-alcohol products have faced is that they simply don’t have the body, texture, and layered flavors of traditional wine. For many, the sheer joy of taste is arguably even more central to the experience of enjoying wine than the alcohol itself. But the alcohol often helps deliver the flavors and aromas people have come to love and expect in a glass of wine.
“When it comes to no- and low-alcohol wines, I tend to use a cheesecake analogy,” says Beth Forrest, the winemaker and general manager of Marlborough, New Zealand-based Forrest Wines. “We all love cheesecake. Full fat, full sugar—the joy is a bite that combines the crispy, buttery base, the creamy filling, and the sweet fruit topping. When someone serves you a deconstructed cheesecake, the elements all exist, but the joy of all of them together has been lost.” Forrest’s goal, she explains, is to essentially create full-alcohol flavor, texture, and aroma in wine, without the alcohol, and to achieve that dealcoholized wines must be deconstructed so that the alcohol can be removed, and then put together in a way that delivers full flavor.
It’s no easy task, and the wine industry is at the beginning of the journey. But there are three new areas of research that are spurring winemakers’ excitement to make not just no- and low-alcohol wine that sells, but terroir-reflective bottles that connoisseurs want to drink.
Using Yeasts to Produce Low-Alcohol Wines
Forrest Wines embarked on its low-alcohol wine journey in 2006, crafting a Kabinett-style Riesling with 9% ABV from the gravels of Marlborough, setting off the first wave of the low-alcohol craze in New Zealand. Then in 2016, Forrest began working with Lallemand and other highly specialized yeast manufacturers in an effort to produce non-alcoholic wines with greater structure and depth.
“Yeasts that are poor converters of sugar and produce less alcohol per gram of sugar produced mixed results depending on types of wine and strains of yeast,” Forrest says. “For us, the huge development in yeast options is more related to texture, mid-palate weight, mouthfeel, roundness, and length of flavor. These have been highly valuable to replace the density of alcohol in wine.”
Since 1903, Lallemand, a company that specializes in the development, production, and marketing of yeasts, bacteria, and specialty ingredients, has helped transform wine, beer, and breadmaking, by exploring the range of ways microscopic fungus can convert sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Lallemand Oenology’s research and development manager Eveline Bartowsky, Ph.D., works closely with internal research communities and wine producers on finding ways to reduce alcohol content in wines effectively, without sacrificing flavor or body. “To lower the ethanol, and therefore the alcohol in wine, we need to reduce the sugar conversion or redirect yeast metabolism toward other compounds, for instance glycerol, or other metabolites such as organic acids,”
Dr. Bartowsky says. “Species like Lachancea thermotolerans, Metschnikowia pulcherrima, or Candida zemplinina can metabolize sugars differently, producing more glycerol or organic acids instead of ethanol.”
Bartowsky notes that these species must be deployed with precision during sequential or co-inoculation, in combination with non-Saccharomyces or with Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Utilizing these yeasts in the proper way will reduce alcohol by 0.5 to 1.5% ABV without compromising quality. (Studies have shown that certain nontraditional yeast reduce the ethanol yield while still fermenting must to complete dryness.) Higher reduction levels require additional partner techniques, like early harvest or reverse osmosis.
Pia Merrick, a head winemaker at Australian Vintage, sees yeast as an essential cast member, but not a star, when it comes to reducing alcohol in wine.
“We achieved excellent results by using non-Saccharomyces yeasts, particularly Metschnikowia pulcherrima, Lachancea thermotolerans, and Starmerella bacillaris yeasts, which are specialised and designed to lower alcohol while enhancing freshness,” Merrick explains. “By producing naturally 1% to 4% lower-alcohol base wines through sequential inoculations with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we can reduce processing time on the spinning cone when making zero-alcohol wines, helping to preserve freshness and aroma.”
Merrick points to Viniferm NS Chance and Excellence Celsius as being particularly adept at devouring sugar for biomass instead of ethanol.
Too much wine, too little time
Without yeast activity, sugar can’t be converted into alcohol. In addition to finding and utilizing slow-moving yeast, vintners are halting their activities during key moments of production.
Weingut Van Volxem in Germany’s Mosel focuses on a range of wines from 0% to 12% ABV. The winery relies on the spinning cone for non-alcoholic wines. Increasingly, Felix Rossbach, the winery’s second cellarmaster, says they are eager to preserve some alcohol, which “powers the taste and aroma of the wine,” while nixing much of it, through techniques like arresting fermentations through cooldowns. “It can also be a first step to zero,” he says. “By lowering alcohol first, we set up the wine. We are still perfecting the technique for zero-alcohol wine, but by cooling it down during fermentation, we can preserve the aromas and flavors, while still reducing alcohol levels significantly.”
The process begins during harvest, Rossbach explains. After the grapes are plucked, the cellar team rapidly cools the fruit down with dry ice to stave off and slow down the speed at which yeast consumes sugar. The grapes then go into a stainless steel sedimentation tank fitted with cooling sides, or pillowplates, that chill the must for clarification and continue to inhibit yeast metabolism.
During fermentation, the team at Van Volxem ferments the grapes at around 57.2 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in aromatic compounds, then cut off fermentation around halfway through a standard fermentation. Finally, they rapidly cool the nascent wine down to 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We add sulfur at this stage to stop fermentation completely and deactivate yeasts,” Rossbach says. “Kabinett-style wines will get more sulfur than drier wines. You will have around 40 to 100 grams per liter of residual sugar if you stop at 5% to 7% ABV, depending on the starting sugar grades in the must.”
Stripping Out Ethanol with New Tech
The fastest way to remove alcohol from wine is by stripping the ethanol. But it’s also the most challenging method, because along with alcohol, aromas and flavors often get stripped out of the wine.
Winemakers have tinkered with different forms of technology for more than a century, with incremental improvements notched along the way. Vacuum distillation, reverse osmosis, and spinning cone technology have been crucial for producers hoping to lower the ABV of wine and remove alcohol entirely, but technology has a way of evolving quickly, taking best practices from multiple inventions, and leaving the clunkiest iterations in the past.
Solos, a global aroma technology company with facilities across Europe, recently opened its first facility in Hopland, California. Initially developed in Munich, the technology is used for extracting flavors and aromas from seeds, pulps, and skins in juice production. “Most of the time, all of the aroma and flavor compounds in a wine are lost because of the way their chemical properties are linked to ethanol,” says Matt Hughes, the general manager of Solos USA. “We bypass that by removing those compounds from ethanol, then reintroduce the compounds to the original, alcohol-free product.”
While the team can’t release all of the details about the patented program, Hughes explains that it involves vacuum distillation at temperatures below 30 degrees Celsius via a packed column still. “This process allows us to work with large volumes, but in a very gentle solid phase extraction method,” Hughes says. “The technology has been utilized in award-winning wines in Germany, and we believe that it is a game-changer in terms of quality.”
Rachel Martin, the owner of California’s Oceano Zero, and a new client of Solos, agrees. “We’re focused on single-vineyard non-alcoholic wines,” Martin says. “Without this technology, many of the nuances were lost. Once I compared test batches using this technology with spinning cone technology, the difference in aromatic presence was impossible to ignore.”
At ALTR, a beverage technology company in Phoenix, Arizona, the team is also intent on cracking the code that will unlock alcohol-free, flavor-full wine. “Our machine will help winemakers craft wines from zero to mid-strength that will preserve the sensory experience of wine, from flavor to structure and mouthfeel,” says Richard Schatzberger, the CEO and cofounder of ALTR. “We are removing ethanol from the wine on a molecular level through nano-membrane filtration.”
ALTR’s Velvet Blade membrane technology is designed to gently remove alcohol from wine while preserving its character. The dual-sided system works to keep all of the structure and flavor of the wine without heating or leaving its tank while continually pulling out the ethanol. The patent-pending process retains all of the aromas, acids, polyphenols, and original water in the wine. It is currently going through tests with a pilot machine at a facility in Napa.
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A Vineyard-First Approach Is Essential
There are indubitably other important technologies in the works. But some of the pioneers of low- and no-winemaking believe that a great product, no matter where it lands on the ABV spectrum, begins with thoughtful farming techniques.
Forrest, whose winery helped pioneer the premium no- and low-alcohol space, believes that all great wine begins in the vineyard. “The wine you start with needs to be of exceptional quality as you will only concentrate the elements of the wine when you distill it or strip out parts of it,” she says. “Often people are using discard or overflow wine to start, and so the products at the end are not attractive. It actually requires more effort and better winemaking and vineyard management to make the base wine for good lower [alcohol] products.”
Starting with the best practices in the vineyard, then applying technology judiciously is good advice for anyone aiming to craft great wine, whether with no alcohol, low alcohol, or full strength.
