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Sue and I hadn’t given much thought to non-alcoholic wine (NA wine) for a while but then we read Florence Fabricant’s NY Times article on “8 Non-Acoholic Wines for the Thanksgiving Table” and we knew we had to take another look at this growing category.
The “Second Glass” Test
There are more and more wines in the “No and Low” alcohol category and when we have occasionally tried one or two we have been disappointed. Although we’ve had a sense that the quality is rising along with demand, nothing really passed the “second glass” test. I might be OK with a glass of one of the NA wines we’d sampled if I needed to avoid alcohol for some reason (designated driver role, for example, or a prescription drug issue), but I probably wouldn’t ask for a second glass.
I’d probably choose an NA beer over an NA wine. NA beers have made big strides. Both imports and domestic products like the ones from Athletic Brewing are high on my list. They taste good, remind me of the kind of beer they are made to represent, and cost about the same as the real thing. I’d be happy to accept a second glass. That’s what we are looking for in NA wine, too.
Journey to NA-ville
Fabricant’s column in hand, we made our way to the local big box beverage superstore and asked for directions to the NA wine section. We were led to the opposite side of the store to a section where all of the NA products (beer, wine, spirits) were on display. There were more NA wines on the shelf than I had imagined, many of them fruit-flavored. Since NA products are regulated as food, not booze, they all had full nutritional information and ingredient lists, so calories, carb counts, and additives were easily identified.
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We found one of Fabricant’s recommendations on a lower shelf, the Giesen NA Pinot Grigio from New Zealand, and bought that along with the Giesen NA Sauvignon Blanc. Both wines were mixtures of de-alcoholized wine and a bit of grape juice and some other ingredients. I suspect the juice adds some body that is lost in the de-alcoholization process. We know and respect this producer (and even visited the winery a few years ago), so we were interested in how they would stand up to our tests.
The Giesen wines were better than the NA wines I remembered from past experiments (easy to see why they’ve become so popular), but for me, they didn’t pass the “second glass” test. They tasted fine and cost about the same as the regular Giesen wines, but they didn’t really remind me of Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc. But, a step in the right direction.
JØYUS Discovery
Then, by happy coincidence, we received a sample bottle of JØYUS NA sparkling wine. Sue had speculated that sparkling NA wine might be the right direction based, in part, on our experiments with canned wine; she was right. The bubbly wine tasted very good, reminded us of sparkling wine (and not sparkling cider), and at less than $30 per bottle it was priced between Prosecco and Champagne and so in the range you might expect for sparkling wine.
The main ingredients are de-alcoholized wine, water, white grape juice concentrate, natural flavors, and carbon dioxide (to make the bubbles). By the numbers: 30 calories and 6 grams of carbohydrates per 8-ounce serving. (Eight ounces? Yes. Remember that this is a non-alcoholic beverage so larger serving sizes apply.)
Seattle-based JØYUS makes other varieties of NA wines, both still and sparkling, including a Cabernet Sauvignon. The wine we tasted won best-in-category at the Sunset magazine competition. Because it is non-alcoholic and regulated as food not booze, JØYUS is available through Amazon.com!
So 2023 ends on a bright note for NA wine. There are NA wines out there that pass the “second glass” test after all, we just have to find them and hope that the list will grow. New Year’s “cheers” to wine (and NA wine) lovers everywhere.
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Many of my friends insisted that they would never drink an NA wine. But they are only partly correct. A lot of them have been drinking partially non-alcoholic wine for years.
Alcohol levels have been rising along with vineyard temperatures and it is one of the wine industry’s open secrets (along with the use of Mega-Purple to deepen wine colors) that they have been forced to take action to bring high abv down.
A common practice is to take some of the wine, de-alcoholize it, and blend it back in to get to the desired alcohol level. This is better than the dark art of adding “Jesus units” (water) to the fermenting wine to accomplish the same. I guess water is the ultimate NA beverage, isn’t it?