How de-alcoholised wine is bad for you – and the planet

A little of what you fancy does you good. And in my case, I really fancy wine, and I’ve managed to make a career out of it.

But you have to be very careful not to indulge in your passion too much. I made a conscious decision some time ago to be very disciplined around alcohol, especially when temptation is everywhere. I generally avoid alcohol during the week, and limit wine to the weekends, to be enjoyed alongside delicious food.

As a result, I am fascinated by “nolo” – a category used to describe drinks with no or low levels of alcohol. It is the fastest-growing category in the drinks sector. Multinational giants Diageo and Pernod Ricard have both outlined “no and low” as a strategic aim, and AB InBev forecast that 20 per cent of their profits will come from “no and low” alcohol beer by 2025.

Germany currently dominates the no-alcohol market but the fastest growth is found in smaller, arguably more dynamic markets such as Australia, the UK and France. All of these markets recorded double-digit no-alcohol growth volume from 2020 to 2021, according to data from the IWSR. This growth trend is worth a lot of money.

It really is great to look for alternatives to alcohol, as we should all be mindful of our consumption and aim to drink less – but you don’t always want to drink things that make you feel like you’re at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. So what options are there for a wine lover? It’s such a confusing category, and it’s easy to be left bamboozled by the terms that are used and the ways these products are produced.

The term “wine” can only legally be used to describe products resulting from alcoholic fermentation of grape juice with an alcohol level of 8 per cent or higher, (except where the minimum is below 8 per cent in a protected designation of origin). All alcohol-free wine starts as normal wine – that is, the sugar from the grape juice is transformed through fermentation into alcohol, aroma and flavour – but then the alcohol is removed.

It does so using methods such as “reverse osmosis” and “vacuum distillation”, which sound more akin to something you’d hear in a chemistry lab than at a vineyard. The process involves separating all the parts of wine that make it glorious – the taste, aroma and mouthfeel – in the pursuit of removing the alcohol.

What’s left is a highly acidic aqueous product, which then needs all of the things that make wine great put back into it. However, there’s no way to do this in a wholly natural way. A gamut of additives and preservatives at the disposal of the industrialised food industry are used at this stage, resulting in a highly processed product.

Once you’ve added back the aromas, you want to reconstitute some of the texture and mouthfeel of regular wine, and there’s one product that does that best: sugar (and lots of it). The average de-alcoholised wine will have 60 grams of sugar per litre.

Of course, this then comes with the risk of contamination from fungi or bacteria – alcohol is a great preservative, it protects the wine from these contamination risks, but de-alcoholised wine doesn’t have any of this protection. And with all that sugar, there’s a risk of refermentation in the bottle too. So, the simplest and most effective method to prevent and protect is pasteurisation. This means exposing the liquid to 70C temperatures for many minutes, which will impact the final flavour (not to mention the energy that is used in this process).

Everything about this process makes me question why we’re trying to create this product in the first place. What winemaker would want to put all of the work that goes into creating a wine – the long cold days pruning in the winter, overseeing the vines every day in the spring and summer, and hoping for favourable weather throughout to ensure a good harvest – and then, once the wine is made, for it to be effectively destroyed and rebuilt using the latest chemical technology? Certainly, none that I know.

I’ve not even mentioned the price – yes, there are cheap options available but they’re pretty dire. To get anything with any flavour, you’ll be paying upwards of £15 per bottle.

Until there are significant improvements in the way in which no-alcohol wines are made, both environmentally and technically, we can do the planet and our bodies a far greater service by choosing other, more natural alternatives.

If you haven’t tried it, maybe experiment with sparkling tea – there are a few producers now, including ones that are available in the supermarket. While there’s still sugar present, it’s at a lower level than non-alcoholic wines, and you’ll also recognise all the other ingredients too. I also love kombucha, which has the benefit of being great for your gut health. Or if you love a spritz, why not swap Aperol for Botivo with sparkling water and a wedge of orange instead? It’s a seriously grown-up-tasting drink and one of my go-to’s throughout the year.

And of course, there’s always water, which to the amusement of my friends is truly one of my favourite drinks, and something I never take for granted having access to.

Rosamund Hall (DipWSET) is a freelance writer and wine expert