How Do They Take the Alcohol Out of Wine?

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.

Alcohol is in the wine. Completely mixed into it.

So when I see a bottle proudly announcing 0.0%, I have one question: how did you get the alcohol out without taking the wine with it? Because apparently that’s the real trick. Removing alcohol is possible. Removing only the alcohol is where things get complicated.

First, You Have to Make the Alcohol You’re Planning to Remove

This still makes me laugh.

Proper dealcoholized wine generally begins with somebody making ordinary wine. Growers harvest the grapes. Producers crush or press them. Yeast gets to work. Fermentation happens. Sugar becomes alcohol. Aromas and flavors develop.

Success. We have wine.

Then somebody walks in and essentially says: excellent, now undo part of it.

It sounds unnecessarily dramatic until you understand why they bother. As I’ve gone into separately when asking whether this whole category is just grape juice, fermentation does much more than produce alcohol. It creates and transforms many of the compounds responsible for wine’s aroma and flavor. Skip fermentation and you haven’t cleverly made alcohol-free wine. You’ve made grape juice. So the alcohol has to exist first. Then we need to make it disappear. And our problems begin.

Problem Number One: How Do You Get Alcohol to Leave?

One obvious idea would be heat. Alcohol evaporates more easily than water, so theoretically you could heat the wine and encourage the alcohol to disappear.

There’s just one small problem. Wine does not particularly enjoy being cooked. Heat can damage the delicate aromas and flavors you’re desperately trying to preserve. You could successfully remove the alcohol and end up celebrating beside a tank of something nobody particularly wants to drink.

So winemakers found a cleverer solution. A vacuum. Under reduced pressure, alcohol evaporates at a much lower temperature, sometimes close to room temperature instead of the roughly 78°C it would normally need. That means vacuum distillation can remove alcohol far more gently than simply heating the life out of the wine.

Excellent. Problem solved. Except it isn’t. Because alcohol may not leave alone.

The Alcohol Starts Heading for the Door. The Aromas Follow It.

This is where dealcoholizing wine becomes slightly unfair.

Some of wine’s aromatic compounds are volatile too. So while you’re celebrating the alcohol disappearing, some of the things responsible for making your wine smell wonderful may be quietly putting on their coats.

And wine without aroma? Congratulations. You won the battle and somehow misplaced the reason for fighting it.

This is where one particularly clever piece of technology enters the story. The spinning cone column, which sounds much more exciting than it has any right to.

So Someone Decided to Rescue the Aromas First

Picture a tall column containing a series of rotating cones. Wine flows through it in extremely thin films while vacuum and steam help separate volatile compounds.

But instead of immediately attacking the alcohol, the system can capture delicate aromatic compounds first. In other words: everybody valuable, step outside for a moment. The system collects the aromas. Then it removes the alcohol. Afterwards, it returns the aromas to the dealcoholized wine. Everybody comes back into the room. Except the alcohol.

I realize I’m making an extremely sophisticated piece of winery equipment sound like nightclub security, but that’s essentially why the process is so useful. The aim isn’t merely to produce a liquid containing very little alcohol. The aim is to remove the alcohol without sending the personality of the wine out with it. And apparently even that wasn’t complicated enough, because there’s another way to approach the problem entirely.

What If We Take the Wine Apart?

Enter reverse osmosis. This one sounds less like traditional winemaking and more like something that requires everyone in the room to wear safety glasses.

Instead of relying mainly on evaporation, reverse osmosis uses specialized membranes. It pushes wine through those membranes, separating smaller molecules like water and alcohol from many of the larger compounds responsible for color and flavor. Producers can then remove the alcohol from the separated liquid before recombining the components they want to keep.

Essentially, instead of saying “let’s pull the alcohol out of the wine,” reverse osmosis says “let’s take this thing apart, deal with the alcohol, and put it back together.” It’s wine surgery. Hopefully with a very good surgeon.

At This Point, I Had Another Question

Which method is best?

This is where the machines stop being particularly useful to us as drinkers. Different producers choose different systems depending on the wine, production scale, equipment available, and what they’re trying to achieve. A machine can have the most impressive name in the winery and still produce a bottle you don’t want a second glass of, because nobody sits at dinner, takes a sip, and says “mmm, excellent membrane separation.”

We smell it. We taste it. Then we decide. The real question isn’t which machine removed the alcohol. It’s what survived the operation.

Because Alcohol Wasn’t Just Sitting There Causing Trouble

This is the part that makes the whole process difficult.

We tend to think of alcohol as the thing in wine responsible for intoxication. Unfortunately, it had other responsibilities. Alcohol contributes warmth and body. It affects texture. It helps carry aroma and changes how we perceive sweetness, acidity, and flavor.

Remove it and you may successfully achieve 0.0% while creating an entirely new problem. The wine feels different. It may seem thinner. Acidity can become more obvious. Sweetness may stand out. The finish can feel shorter. That’s exactly why some non-alcoholic wines are far more convincing than others, something I’ve gone into properly elsewhere.

Getting alcohol out is science. Making you stop noticing that it’s gone is winemaking.

And Now the Price Makes More Sense

This is also where I owe non-alcoholic wine producers a very reluctant apology, because I originally had the same thought many people have: you removed something, why does the bottle cost more?

Now look at what happened. First, they made wine. Then they used specialized equipment to separate the alcohol from everything it had mixed completely into. They tried to prevent delicate aromas from disappearing. They may have captured those aromas and returned them. Then they had to deal with the changes in body, flavor, and balance caused by removing the alcohol in the first place.

Suddenly the price I went into properly in why this category costs what it does doesn’t look quite as ridiculous. I said quite. I’m still checking the price tag.

So How Do They Take the Alcohol Out of Wine?

Very carefully. That’s the short answer.

Vacuum distillation persuades alcohol to evaporate at lower temperatures so the wine doesn’t need to be heavily heated. Spinning cone technology can separate and preserve delicate aromas before removing the alcohol and returning those aromas afterwards. Reverse osmosis uses membranes to separate components of the wine so producers can remove the alcohol before recombining the desired parts.

Three very different approaches to the same slightly ridiculous assignment: take something completely mixed into wine and make it disappear without ruining everything around it.

One more wrinkle worth knowing: not every wine is even legally allowed to go through this process in the first place. Protected wines like Prosecco DOC face their own separate restrictions on dealcoholization, something I’ve gone into properly in a piece on whether non-alcoholic Prosecco can legally exist.

And that, more than the 0.0% printed on the bottle, is what impresses me. Modern technology has already proved we can remove alcohol from wine. The interesting question is what happens next. Does it still smell like wine? Does it still have structure? Do you want another glass?

The machine can remove the alcohol. It cannot make you enjoy what’s left. That’s still the winemaker’s problem, and perhaps the cleverest part of this whole strange category is this: taking the alcohol out isn’t the victory. Taking it out without making us wish they’d left it in, is.

Quick Answers

How is alcohol removed from wine? Mainly through three methods: vacuum distillation, which lowers alcohol’s evaporation point using reduced pressure; spinning cone technology, which separates and preserves aromas before removing alcohol; and reverse osmosis, which uses membranes to separate alcohol from the wine’s other components.

Does removing alcohol damage the wine’s flavor? It can, which is why the method matters. Alcohol carries aroma, body, and texture, so producers need specialized techniques to protect or restore what would otherwise be lost during removal.

Why not just heat the wine to remove the alcohol? Heat damages delicate aromas and flavors. Vacuum-based methods let alcohol evaporate at much lower temperatures, closer to room temperature, which protects the wine’s character far better than simple heating would.

Is one dealcoholization method better than the others? Not universally. Producers choose based on the wine style, production scale, and available equipment. The real measure isn’t which machine did the job, but whether the finished wine is still enjoyable to drink.

Salute.

Continue Exploring

• Is Non-Alcoholic Wine Just Grape Juice?
• Non-Alcoholic Wine Tastes Like Wine. Just Not Exactly Like It.
• Why Is Non-Alcoholic Wine So Expensive?
• Can Non-Alcoholic Prosecco Actually Exist?
• Non-Alcoholic Wine Is Finally Legal to Make in Italy. Barolo Still Can’t Join.