The wine world is as full of trends as any other, with the exception of fashion, which seems to have a new trend every season…Wine may seem a fuddy-duddy world to the outsider, populated by stuffy middle-aged men in suits, talking in clipped tones about whether the harvest was completed before the rains came in 1994, but those days are long-gone.  Probably long-enough gone that you don’t see that when you think of wine merchants or sommeliers.  I’m old enough to remember when it was like that, and only like that.  I also worked at Berry Bros & Rudd…

In any case, we have had organic wines, biodynamic wines, natural wines, pet-nat wines, orange wines, amphora wines.  The Jura region became the darling of sommeliers for a while some years ago.  Before that – a long time before that – racing to France and back to England (it was mainly the English that thought this was a jolly good wheeze) to be the first in the country to get the new release of Beaujolais nouveau was a thing: it gave you bragging rights.  About Beaujolais nouveau.  No, really…!

And now we have NoLo

This is a growing trend, particularly among younger drinkers, for no-or low-alcohol alcohol: beers, wines and spirits with the alcohol removed.

I remember seeing early adverts for things such as Barbican in the 1980s.  At that time, beers such as this were pushed as a way to enjoy beer and still be able to drive home from the pub – or fly home in the case of this advert.  The brewers or other producers also saw a rich potential market in places such as north Africa and the middle-east, not only among the burgeoning western population that might be missing their beer, but the locals, too.

Unsurprisingly, I have no idea if non-alcoholic beers in the early 1980s tasted close to their alcoholic siblings, but it is quite interesting to see the strap line of the above advert: “Now more lager taste”.

According to this article, however, alcohol-free beer has been around for about 7,000 years – though the article does not say how beer was made alcohol-free by the ancient Egyptians: do we have absolute proof that they made alcohol-free beer?  The Open University in the UK reckons that the medieval period is when alcohol-free beer was first developed – the small beers people drank all day as a safe alternative to the polluted water of the towns and cities.  Again, I’m not sure of the accuracy of the alcohol-free claim: it’s not clear that people did anything to the regular beer except add more water to lower the alcohol.

The first verifiably alcohol-free beer, as far as I can tell, was made in Holland in 1918, though there was not much of a market for these drinks until technological developments in the 1980s meant that these products began to taste more like alcoholic beers – as that classic Barbican advert attests.

De-alcoholised wine was invented as far back as 1908 by Carl Jung (not that one…).  They’re still going strong today.  With pressures such as the temperance movement, doctors in the early 20th century urging less alcohol consumption and then prohibition in the US, alcohol-free ‘alcohols’ had a ready market.

Alcohol-free spirits – gin being the high-profile one at present – were invented as recently as 2014 by Ben Branson of Seedlip.  His idea was to answer the question, ‘What do you drink when you’re not drinking?’ (Presumably, he’d never heard of water.)  Gin is an especially good candidate for de-alcoholisation, since it is flavoured so highly to begin with.  (The fact that alcohol-free spirits were not around at the time of prohibition gave rise to cocktail culture in the US – there’s no need to cover the scent of alcohol with other flavours if your spirit doesn’t have any.)

That’s a very potted history of alcohol-free ‘alcohols’.

Today, as well as growing pressure from temperance movements, there is more awareness of the dangers of alcohol-dependency, and a large consumer base wanting drinks such as beers, wines and spirits without the alcohol for reasons other than health or religious belief.  Many simply don’t like the taste of alcoholic drinks.  My sister drinks non-alcoholic gin and tonic – likes the taste, doesn’t want the alcohol – and I drink non-alcoholic beer when I have my son; or in the torrid summers we are getting these days, where 40°C and humidity means I often don’t want alcohol, even at 4 or 5%.  The drinks industry has also realised that women exist and that many of them would like to continue enjoying a glass of wine, beer or gin and tonic while pregnant.  There are myriad reasons for wanting an alcohol-free alternative that isn’t water or squash or flavoured buckets of sugar.  And, as we have seen, pilots drink nothing except non-alcoholic beer…

So it was with great interest that I accepted an invitation from Paolo Repetto, of Vinifera wine merchants here in Alba, to help him blend new cuvées of his Nomora (NO MORe Alcohol) non-alcoholic sparkling wines: a white and a rosé.  If only I had known that there is a song called Nomora, we could have had the ideal soundtrack to our blending session…

There were 3 of us principally: Paolo, fine wine merchant of many years; Mauro Repetto, Paolo’s brother, and a sommelier of long-standing and international experience (he even worked as a sommelier in Hawaii) and myself.  We were later joined by Mauro’s son, Simone – the youngster on the team, since the market for these sorts of drinks appears very much at the youth end of the spectrum, something the three of us have run out of.

We had 4 base wines, all sparkling: a Chardonnay, a Pinot Grigio, a Traminer and a Moscato (dry, not d’Asti).  It was up to us to find a winning combination of these four.

Naturally enough, we came at it from a wine perspective.  In order to kick things off in a semblance of ordered thinking, we first tasted each wine on its own.  Here are my tasting notes for the base wines:

I was interested to note that the more aromatic wines, the Traminer and Moscato, felt closer to their alcoholic counterparts.  The way that alcohol-free wines are made is first to make the wine, with the classic fermentation, and then to take out the alcohol.  This rather excellent article by Decanter tells you a bit about the process if you’re interested.  Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio are much more neutral grape varieties than Traminer and Moscato.  My suspicion was that as the alcohol is removed, you are not only taking that out, but other compounds as well, and so the wines that started out with less abundant aromas and flavours would have relatively little left after the de-alcoholisation process.  I found a musty note on the Pinot and Chardonnay that I didn’t detect on the other two – probably they had more left to cover it and the rebalancing process was less ‘invasive’ as a result.

The received wisdom regarding sparkling wines, however, is that more neutral grape varieties make for better fizz.  Again, I expect that this is because sparkling wines, especially those that stay on their yeast for a long time (years as opposed to weeks) are ‘technical’ wines, where the method is very important in determining the aromas and flavours of the finished product.  It seems to be that the more you do to the fermenting or fermented juice, the better it is to start with neutral grape varieties.  For this reason, sparkling wine producers around the world have sought to emulate, interpret, copy or eclipse Champagne rather than Sekt.

Having tried the four base wines, we then began the process of blending, as Paolo is doing above, to arrive at a preferred cuvée.  This can be a daunting prospect, since with four different wines, we could go anywhere: 90% one of them, the rest made up of the other three; 25% each; 70/10/10/10; and so on ad infinitum.

We decided to begin with two 50/50 cuvées.  One was 50/50 Pinot Grigio and Traminer, since this was blending the most neutral of the four, the Pinot Grigio, with the most aromatic, the Traminer.  The second was 50/50 Chardonnay and Moscato.  We went off on tangents from there.  Here are my notes for these:

I was interested to find that though the Traminer was much more powerful aromatically than the Pinot Grigio, the mustiness from the Pinot Grigio dominated in the 50/50 blend of the two.  As you can see, to begin with – probably because we were approaching it as wine, rather than a non-alcoholic drink – we cleaved to the aromatic varieties as a base, with Chardonnay and/or Pinot Grigio added.  We wanted more ‘winey’ wines, and to eliminate the mustiness we found in the Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio.

We needed to contrast this, however, so we then tried the neutral varieties as a base, either as a pair or with a minority of the more aromatic Traminer or Moscato as well.

Bearing out the theory that more neutral varieties make better fizz, these wines seemed to offer us a bit more balance and harmony.  But the profiles of these drinks were not what I would normally associate with alcoholic wines: we were into green tea, mint, herbs, not much in the way of fruit, apart from the mandarin character of the least successful wine, the Traminer.  The body, texture and mouthfeel were not like alcoholic wines, either.

In the end, our winner on the day was a blend of 70% Pinot Grigio, which on its own I had found the most anonymous, and 30% Moscato with its minty-sage character.  The final result had some of the mint and sage, a little florality, notes of green tea, good balance and integration, fresh acidity and no overt sweetness, nor mustiness.

We then played around a bit to blend the rosé: starting with the white and adding basically 1 or 2% red wine to colour it, as they do in Champagne (Champagne is the only AOP in France where you are allowed to blend in red wine to create a rosé).  We then tried greater quantities of red wine to give a deeper colour, more body and any dark fruits we might find in the original red.

I have to say – and I must point out that this was my first encounter with non-alcoholic wines – that the two still reds we tried; from the Montepulciano grape and a varietal Merlot; were really not that successful.  Even coming at them from a less wine-biased perspective I found the Merlot, in particular, challenging to enjoy.

As we increased and decreased the amout of red in the blend, it became clear that a splash was the way forward, both in terms of colour and overall aromas and flavours.  Around 3% red added seemed the best on the day: the result kept the qualities of the original white blend but added an appealing hint of red berry and currant fruits.

Admittedly from a very small sample size, and conceding my inexperience, it seemed to me that if you consider these drinks as you would a wine, this may lead you to prop your ladder against the wrong window, as Lenny Henry memorably put it when talking about choosing comedy over drama.  I think I need to approach them as I would something such as an elderflower cordial mixed with soda water, as opposed to comparing them to Champagne, Prosecco, Cava and so on.  They are quite different to alcoholic wines.  My experience of drinking non-alcoholic beers is that these are much closer to their more dissolute siblings – indeed my sister, enthusiastic consumer of non-alcoholic beer as well as the spirit-free gin mentioned earlier, will not have an alcohol-free beer in the morning, simply because it tastes too much like ‘the real thing’.

The non-alcoholic wines we tried do not taste like regular wines.  If I fancy a glass of Chardonnay, but do not want alcohol, I probably won’t opt for a non-alcoholic Chardonnay.  If, on the other hand, I fancy something refreshing, different and food-friendly, then opting for one of these wines would hit the spot.  Either of the two cuvées we came up with would be perfect on a nice warm day, with a plate of sushi and some friends (eat one or both, according to preference and local laws).

I should stress, too, that this was an initial blending session – Paolo may well refine his cuvées before they are bottled and released.  And I haven’t tried still, non-alcoholic Chardonnay, Traminer and so on.  There’s a whole world out there to explore.  If you’re interested to try more non-alcoholic wines, I would recommend searching out a portfolio tasting by producers, importers, distributors or retailers, where you can try a wide range of products to see how you like them.  There may be a wine bar in your area that specialises in NoLo, too.

Here in Alba, of course, a bar specialising in wines without alcohol would be an ambitious enterprise.

As I left the tasting, Paolo said to me, “You are in the top 4 experts on non-alcoholic wines in Alba.”  The other three were sitting around the table…