Why Is It So Hard to Find a Good Nonalcoholic Wine?

Extracting the alcohol from a wine can also remove richness and body from the finished product. But these 10 producers have cracked the code.

Making a good nonalcoholic wine is hard work. You have to first farm the grapes and make the wine, which, as anybody who’s worked a harvest, rotated a barrel or wrestled a recalcitrant hose can tell you, is no easy task.

Then you need to extract the alcohol. This is not so labor intensive, but it’s especially hard on the wine as you must subject it to the sort of technological manipulation that good winemakers abhor. Essentially, that means putting it through vacuum distillation using a spinning cone to deconstruct the wine into its component parts. You then set aside the alcohol and reassemble the other piece into a coherent whole.

Unfortunately, what remains lacks more than the alcohol. In wine, alcohol plays a greater role than as an intoxicant. It adds richness and body, it carries flavors and aromas, and it’s essential to the balance and structure of a wine. If it’s removed, something else must do that work.

Winemakers around the world have thrown themselves into the challenge for good reasons aside from the desire for an appealing nonalcoholic drink. While sales of alcoholic beverages have been stagnant over the last couple of years, the market for nonalcoholic beverages has rocketed upward. It grew by more than 30 percent last year, according to Nielsen, fueled primarily by concerns over wellness and moderation.

Naturally, producers from brewers to liquor companies want to capitalize on this trend. Bartenders can make compelling nonalcoholic cocktails by leaving out spirits. It’s simply a matter of creating beautiful, balanced combinations. Brewers can control the fermentation of beers to prevent the formation of alcohol, and can augment other ingredients like hops and malt to add flavors.

But the obstacles for winemakers are particularly daunting. Wine generally has much more alcohol and higher acidity than beer, and alcohol plays a larger role in its structure compared with other beverages.