Picture ordering a bottle of wine at a restaurant. The waiter opens it, pours you a taste, you nod your approval. Normal so far. Then the follow-up question arrives. “Would you like that at 14%, or shall we take it down a little?” I’m sorry, what? We’ve spent years learning…
Nine Platinum medals. Every single one for white wine. From one of Italy’s smallest wine regions. At some point, that stops being a lucky year. It starts being a pattern. The medals came from the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards, where Alto Adige outperformed every other Italian region or sub-region…
Every wine has a season it’s built for, whether anyone admits it or not. Rosé wants sunshine. Prosecco wants a terrace. And somewhere around the point where you start wearing a scarf indoors, out of necessity and not fashion, a certain kind of red wine finally gets let off the…
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…
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