These NA wines are not wines at all
There's a lot of non-alcoholic wine out there. What TZP offers on our virtual shelves is a mere fraction of what's on the market. But there's an important distinction to be made on non-alcoholic shelves: the difference between dealcoholized wines and built wines.
Dealcoholized wines are the non-alcoholic wines that most closely resemble traditional wine: in fact, by definition, it starts its production process AS traditional wine with alcohol. Real, fully fermented wine — grapes, aging, the whole thing. The alcohol is then removed using low-temperature methods designed to protect flavor (not strip it). Vacuum distillation lowers the boiling point so alcohol evaporates off of the liquid, without cooking the wine. Reverse osmosis filters the wine through a membrane that separates out the alcohol, and recombines everything else. Lastly, spinning cone columns spin the wine at high speed to peel off delicate aromatics, remove the alcohol, then reintroduce those aromatics. All precision, not brute force — built to protect the stuff that makes the wine taste like… wine.
But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
We find the distinction itself, to be made ahead of tasting, is integral: If sippers expect a beverage that tastes like traditional wine, they’re often quite disappointed (ask TZP’s customer service team). But there's a whole bunch of companies out there creating some of the most fascinating, sophisticated and delicious drinks in the non-alcoholic marketplace.
The first thing to know about wine alternatives is that they aren’t trying to imitate wine. They rarely try to mimic traditional wine varieties. You may see a company market its creations by hinting that they could be a substitute for a red or a rosé, but on the whole, most wine alternatives shy away from that association. Instead, they exist in parallel with traditional winemaking, whether alcoholic or not. And, of course, they fit the wine occasion: Something delicious to enjoy alongside a meal, a ritual to signify the end of your day, or something worth celebrating with.
Built wines are built from scratch using ingredients such as fruits, flowers, herbs, verjus, bespoke botanicals, tea, bark, spices… pretty much anything that will create an interesting flavor. Combined, these ingredients can create acidity, tannins and complexity, and ultimately a substitute for wine that can be beautifully paired with all kinds of food.
Non-alcoholic wine in its earliest forms has been around for decades, though it is only in recent years that the wine industry as a whole has begun to take the category seriously. Now we are seeing a huge influx of quality non-alc wines from across the globe as wineries react to public demand. Wine alternatives have a shorter history, with most of the pioneering brands founded within the last decade. It’s still a relatively nascent concept, but a handful of exceptional brands have come to the fore, with their beverages now enjoyed in some of the best hotels and restaurants in the world.
Here’s a look at some of the wine alternative brands that The Zero Proof carries.
Copenhagen Sparkling Teas
Among the many founder stories citing the lack of quality non-alcoholic drinks as the reason they got into the business, Copenhagen Sparkling Tea stands out perhaps the most. That's because they never started out wanting to create a non-alcoholic beverage. Instead, Jacob Kocemba, a sommelier at a Michelin-starred restaurant, was looking for a pairing for a dessert and came up short despite having the restaurant’s enormous wine cellar of 1,700 bottles at his disposal.
So he started experimenting with tea, blending different varieties to create tannins, bitterness, acidity, aroma and texture. In the same way blending grapes produces different wines, blending teas would create different flavour profiles. In some cases, Kocemba and his co-founder, Bo Sten Hansen, would combine up to 13 different teas to achieve the flavour they were looking for. After seven years of tinkering with teas, by 2017 the pair were ready to launch Copenhagen Sparkling Tea. As a pioneer of wine alternatives, their three 0% labels—BLÅ, LYSERØD and LYSEGRØN—along with a handful of low-alcohol sparkling teas, can be found in over 100 Michelin-starred restaurants. Not too shabby for a sommelier looking for a drink to go with a dessert!
So what of Copenhagen Sparkling Tea's 0% line?
The first thing you notice about LYSEGRØN is the potent aroma of lime as you bring the glass to your nose. The next is how wonderfully dry the sparkling tea is, lying like a light blanket over the citrus—the aforementioned lime connecting with orange. Green and white teas lend elements that are floral, grassy and ever so crisp on the exit. It’s delicately bold—if there is such a thing.
LYSERØD is Copenhagen Sparkling Tea’s stand-in for a rosé. It too is on the dry side, even more so than its other two siblings. A delightful mix of apples and berries greets you on the nose, but it’s two flavours that dominate when you take your first sip. Blackberries and hibiscus entwine with the rich, roasted, nutty, dark flavour of oolong tea. The taste then takes another turn, balanced out by the light floral flourish of Silver Needle white tea. The teas do more of the heavy lifting with LYSERØD, enhancing the overall complexity. It’s lovely stuff.
BLÅ perhaps demands the most praise. For those wanting these sparkling teas to achieve something resembling a sparkling wine, BLÅ might just scratch the itch. To some degree they all do in their own way, but BLÅ is by far the closest. It is, however, still very much its own creation. Once again, delicately bold comes to mind. Green jasmine tea gives a wonderfully floral, perfumed sweetness and just a hint of grass. A little lime, or maybe lemon, lingers far in the background, possibly from the First Flush Darjeeling tea, which also infuses notes of stone fruit. The only word I can come up with is exquisite. Unbelievably so.
Norie
One of the many wonderful things about non-alcoholic drinks is that there are no rules. Many non-alcoholic brands have leaned into the vast array of botanicals to conjure up their flavours, while others experiment with wood, mushrooms and even seaweed. For Norïe, it’s flowers—more specifically, fermented flowers. The New Jersey–based company came onto the scene at the beginning of last year, taking its place in the sparsely populated wine-alternative category. Using slow fermentation to experiment with and tweak flavours, the founders have mixed and matched their flowers with all kinds of fruits, botanicals and spices.
Unquestionably floral on the nose, Red Rose Whisper leads with its namesake flower, followed by a welcome flourish of cherry and stewed strawberry. Pomegranate adds a cranberry-like mix of tartness and bitterness while also contributing sweetness. The fermented milk thistle introduces an earthy, tea-like flavour. Citrus appears in the form of orange peel and Meyer lemon, along with a fleeting glimpse of vanilla. The combination provides a stunning tapestry of flavours. I don’t know how many iterations it took to arrive at this final recipe, but however long it took, it was time well spent.
If Red Rose Whisper could be described as warm and comforting, then Lots of Purple takes the comfort to another level. Syrah grapes produce deep berry flavours—a swirl of blackberry, blueberry and plum—while chrysanthemum and chamomile fill the senses with floral notes. A silky-smooth body and a delightful depth of flavour make this a must for those looking for a red wine alternative.
Proxies
One of the most well-known wine alternative brands in North America is Proxies. The Canadian beverage company was born from Toronto’s Acid League, an experimental food company widely known for its vinegar products. Working under the name Acid League Wine Proxies, the company worked feverishly on recipes throughout 2020, debuting a mind-boggling 30 unique, limited-run flavours via DTC subscriptions in 2021. By January of the following year, Proxies had spun off from Acid League and begun settling on a far smaller core line-up of flagship blends.
Two of these flagship blends have become TZP customer favourites and with good reason. The first thing I thought of when I tasted Crisp White was white grapefruit, but it turns out the combination of white grape, lemon, mandarin and quassia extract conjures up a similar flavour. A second glass brought mandarin and peach to the fore, while lychees added a sweet, floral undertow and the slightest touch of ginger kept all the other ingredients from getting too carried away. Honestly, I can’t get enough of Crisp White, and it ranks very high among my all-time favourite non-alcoholic drinks across all categories, never mind just wine alternatives.
Of all the built wines I’ve tried, Big Red makes the greatest effort to align itself with a true red wine, or at least to give you a similar experience. The blend is fascinating: cherry, blackberry and raspberry mingle with red wine concentrate, forming a dark, fruity base. A tea blend of chicory root, cascara, black malt and hibiscus is then introduced to the party, enhancing the fruits but adding a healthy serving of earthy woodiness to the finish, which takes the fruitiness down a notch. This may or may not satisfy those out there who are searching for the perfect non-alc red wine, but for folks like me, Big Red shows once again that Proxies nails virtually every drink they produce.
Villbrygg
Much like Copenhagen Sparkling Tea’s journey, the story of Villbrygg from Norway began with its two founders noticing a gaping hole in the dining experience. With Nordic cuisine flourishing on the culinary map, why wasn’t the alcohol-free beverage experience given as much thought as the food was?
Vanessa Krogh and Cornelia Øiestad, both veterans of the restaurant world themselves, set about changing that narrative by starting Villbrygg. The pair work with farmers and foragers months in advance to source Nordic ingredients. Fruits, botanicals, herbs and wood all play their part, along with fermentation, resulting in three sparkling beverages—Fjell 01, Eng 02 and Skog 03—which have indeed found their way into numerous Michelin-starred restaurants, bringing their story full circle.
Fjell 01 (forthcoming this holiday season on TZP) is their mountain drink, blending lingonberry with an infusion of lemongrass, rosemary and birch leaves. On the nose you smell berries, pine, rosemary and a light jamminess that's immediately confirmed once you take your first sip. But the berries, both mildly sweet and tart, are only half the story. The rosemary adds pine along with bitterness to a moderately carbonated mix, balancing out what sweetness there is. Lemongrass lends citrus and ginger, while birch leaves quietly slip in some resin. It’s an outstanding wine alternative, benefiting from not being overly complex for the sake of it and, let me tell you, extremely easy to drink.
Skog 03 represents the forest. Not a dark, dank forest in a rainstorm at dusk when you’re lost and you forgot to put on your wellies. More a stroll along a forest pathway in the summer, with sunlight curtaining the forest floor, birds chirping and deer wandering across your path with their fawns. It’s a bright, vibrant, slightly earthy, citrus-forward drink with a hint of pine, created from a fermented infusion of spruce shoots, lemongrass, yarrow and, making a second appearance, birch leaves. It’s so wonderfully well-rounded, never veering too close to being labelled a juice nor leaning too heavily into the botanicals to scare anyone away. It’s truly close to perfection.
Cul Sec
Cul Sec is part of a family of businesses under the Fruitlagers umbrella company out of the Netherlands. The beverage makers employ a philosophy aimed at regenerative farming and supporting healthy natural landscapes. It is most definitely not just about the drinks, but about embracing the ingredients around them and leaving things in better shape than they found them.
While definitely a wine alternative, Cul Sec’s collection sits a little closer to traditional wine than the tea-based brands that you’ll also find in this category. Each of their creations starts with a foundation built from grapes, usually verjus (unripened grapes), which offers acidity and aroma. And then their creativity kicks in: different woods for tannins, oyster shells for minerals, fermented fruits for depth, with herbs and botanicals providing the drink’s complexity. They are foragers with a mission.
Cul Sec produces four varieties, with The Zero Proof offering two of the favourites — L’Étable Fume and Balade Minéral.
The list of ingredients for Balade Minéral is as long as your arm, and frankly the mind boggles at how the Cul Sec team settled on the final selection, given the vastly different sources—from the sea to the woods to the fields. The result is a splendid concoction of Müller-Thurgau and Bacchus grapes, layered with rhubarb and parsnip, a squirt of apple cider vinegar and then infused with a wash of oyster shells, oak, pine, Douglas fir, rose and lavender. Despite the pull of all those flavours, it is the overriding taste of minerals, earth and stone that ties the drink, and its many parts, together. I’ve not tasted anything like this, but it is nothing short of stunning.
L’Étable Fume has an ingredient label no shorter and no less baffling than its sibling. But this time the flavours lean more towards earthy roots, stewed fruits and a whiff of smokiness. Viognier and Sauvignon grapes join forces with the Bacchus grapes to form the base. The combination of apple cider and kombucha adds a little sourness to the mix, while apricot and lacto-fermented peach bring some tang along with a little sweetness. There are a hundred other things going on in the bottle, but whatever the magic is, it’s working.
