For years, alcohol-free wine had exactly one hard problem, and it wasn’t the alcohol. It was the wine. You could remove the alcohol easily enough. Design a nice label, print 0.0% somewhere reassuringly large, and tell everyone this was the future of drinking. Then somebody tasted it. Too sweet, too…
Okay, so I need to tell you something. It’s going to make you side-eye every wine shop you’ve ever walked into. You know how you pick up a bottle, check the label, maybe Google it standing in the aisle like a completely normal person? Then you take it home. There’s…
If Italian sparkling wine is having a decent year while everything else struggles, there’s an obvious explanation. Prosecco. It’s always Prosecco, the bottle that conquered brunch, colonized the aperitivo hour. The one that convinced half the world that adding orange liquid to bubbles counts as a personality. Except Prosecco is…
Imagine having a genuinely good harvest and being told: excellent, now don’t sell all of it. That’s more or less what’s happening in Valpolicella this year. The 2026 harvest started early, nearly two weeks ahead of the historical average. Corvina is already in. Corvinone and Rondinella are close behind. Despite…
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…
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….
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….
In the early 1900s, the average Italian drank about 128 liters of wine a year. Today, that number sits around 26. Read that as a decline, and you’d be right. Read it as the whole story, and you’d be missing the genuinely interesting part. The Decline Is Real. It’s Also…
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