For most of 2025, an Italian winery that wanted to remove the alcohol from its own wine had to ship it to Germany. Someone else took the alcohol out. Then it came back. Not because the technology didn’t exist here. Because it was illegal to do it on Italian soil….
I’ve seen bottles described as non-alcoholic Prosecco. Alcohol-free Prosecco. Zero-alcohol Prosecco. Prosecco alternatives. Prosecco-style sparkling wine. At some point I started wondering whether Prosecco itself had been informed about any of this. Because Italy has rules. Lots of rules. You cannot grow some Glera grapes wherever you fancy, put bubbles…
I bought a bottle of alcohol-free Moscato a while back. Fifteen euros. It got me asking questions I didn’t expect to spend this much time answering. Is this wine, or an expensive impersonation of it? How do you even get alcohol out of something once it’s already mixed in? Why…
Here’s what bothered me. Alcohol isn’t floating politely at the top of a bottle of wine, waiting to be poured away. You can’t strain it out. You can’t fish it out. There is unfortunately no tiny winery employee standing over the tank with tweezers, removing ethanol molecules one by one….
I understand the suspicion. Non-alcoholic wine comes from grapes. Grape juice comes from grapes. Neither one needs to contain enough alcohol to make a dinner conversation more interesting. And some non-alcoholic wines taste noticeably sweeter than the real thing. So when my fifteen-euro bottle of alcohol-free Moscato lands on the…
I bought a non-alcoholic Moscato recently. Fifteen euros. For a wine that, with the alcohol left in, usually costs half that. Moscato has never been a wine that demands respect at the till. It’s cheap, sweet, easy, the wine equivalent of a song you enjoy without needing to defend it….
Someone always says the same thing about non-alcoholic wine. You honestly can’t tell the difference. I want to tell the difference immediately whenever I hear that. You took a finished wine. You pulled out one of the compounds responsible for its body, its aroma, its whole weight in the mouth….
Right now, across most of Italy, vendemmia is happening. That’s the word for the grape harvest, and if you live here, you feel it before you see it. Tractors moving slower through country roads because they’re loaded down. Restaurant menus quietly swapping in something new. A kind of low hum…
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