As sales of alcoholic beverages have slowed in recent years, nonalcoholic beer, wine and spirits have emerged as one of the fastest-growing sectors in the drinks industry. No longer a niche category for the sober or pregnant, NA drinks are attracting a wide audience of health-conscious, sober-curious or just occasionally alcohol-free consumers too. For wine lovers, NA options have historically lagged behind beer, the overwhelming market leader.
“Wine is still an emerging category in the nonalcoholic space,” says Hector Diaz, who founded In Good Spirits, the West Town nonalcoholic bottle shop and bar, with his partner, Adriana Gaspar. “But it’s gained momentum fast,” he adds, with a big influx of vibrant, creative products reshaping the market. The NA wine sphere consists of two main categories: dealcoholized wines, meaning fully fermented grape wines from which alcohol has been removed, and wine alternatives, also known as wine proxies, not derived from wine.
The gold standard in dealcoholized wines is produced by vacuum distillation, a process invented in 1907 by a German vintner, Carl Jung, that gently extracts alcohol from wines in a vacuum-sealed tank. Carl Jung, his namesake wine estate, remains the industry leader today, producing 15 million-17 million bottles of NA wine annually, including products for many of the world’s top NA-wine brands, including Noughty, Oddbird and Leitz. The biggest critique of NA wines is that dealcoholization strips wine of its bo.