Europe has a genuinely strange wine problem this year. Some cellars have too much wine. Some vineyards barely have enough grapes to fill a bottle. Italy is looking at storage tanks it doesn’t know what to do with. France is heading into its smallest harvest since 1957. And somewhere in…
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…
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….
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