Nonalcoholic wine is hardly worth the squeeze
Ispent much of last year wondering if the perennial liquor bans would catapult the de-alcoholised beverage business from almost embarrassing obscurity to front of stage.
Suppliers undoubtedly experienced a mini-boom, if only because a number of imaginative and sleight-handed restaurateurs used their products as window-dressing (or perhaps fig leaves) while serving trusted patrons the more traditionally satisfying fruits of the harvest. There was certainly a time when you could sit down in quite reputable establishments and see some of the best known of the alcoholfree wines on the tables of diners far too joyous to be drinking from the bottles set before them.
It’s curious how ready we are to assume that no-one in her or his right mind would ever voluntarily drink nonalcoholic wine. This is not because of a macho presumption, the beverage equivalent of “real men don’t eat quiche”. Nor is it because wine is regarded as the obvious shortcut to inebriation. In fact, unless papsakke are your preferred form of packaging, wine is probably the least economically efficient way to raise your blood alcohol level.
It is because fine wine is more about the nuances of taste than most other drinks, so why would you consent to anything that would compromise your pleasure?
There’s plenty of genuinely alcohol-free beer about, and all the ones I’ve tasted are pretty decent. They may be a little less substantial than normal strength beer, but they are hardly a shadow of what they purport to be.
You cannot say this for dealcoholised wine, or zero octane gin-and-tonic. You would have to be deeply delusional to assert that the taste difference is insignificant: you can put all the juniper, angelica and quinine you like into a fancy bottle, jazz it up with a blast of CO² and a twist of lemon, but it still will be what the Americans call a soda and we a soft drink.
The test is very simple: de-alcoholised vodka is called water, and is about as interesting. In Liverpool they say: all hair on top and no bread in the house.
Alcohol-free wine is not grape juice. Like zero-alcohol beer, it’s been fermented in the normal way, and the alcohol has been removed, mainly by reverse osmosis, though lowpressure evaporation has also been used. The technology is now so good that there is less alcohol in the finished product than you would find in recently squeezed orange juice.
But something happens when you do this to wine, something that doesn’t appear to affect beer in the same way or to the same extent: you strip it of its body, its mid-palate weight, its freshness and its vinosity. The aromas become fragile, the mouthfeel attenuated, the finish falls flat. In short, unless you were stumbling out of the Atacama Desert and seriously dehydrated, alcohol-free wine would not be on your wish list.
DE-ALCOHOLISED VODKA IS WATER, AND AS INTERESTING. IN LIVERPOOL THEY SAY: ALL HAIR ON TOP AND NO BREAD IN THE HOUSE
But sometimes it can be the only beverage on the table, other than Coke, water and fake gin. On those special (and hopefully infrequent) occasions, you will want to know what your best options are. I braved the gloomy places where such wine is marketed and assembled a lineup of many of the major brands, which I then tasted blind. I was told by my tasting room manager which wines were zero alcohol and which merely “low alcohol”.
Statisticians who might like to claim that this information prejudiced my judgment may be scientifically correct but factually way off the mark. The differences are screamingly obvious. The de-alcoholised offerings come with a whiff of wine on the nose, but that’s as close as you get. Scrawny and sherbetty, most taste more of Cal-C-Vita than grapes.
The best of the bunch were the Leopard’s Leap Naturas, white and red, closely followed by Darling Cellars Shiraz. All of the low-alcohol offerings beat the zero-alcohol wines, but that’s a little like saying that if you are alone on a desert island, a blow-up doll is a lifechanging gift.