It’s been a while between blogs. Always lots happening in a world with a full-time job, a winery, 5 children and a partner. It is nice to sit down from time to time and bash out a few paragraphs. Just doesn’t seem to happen as often as I’d like.

So what’s going on? I thought I’d write a little bit about what I do in my day job at the Australian Wine Research institute. For about 5 years now, I’ve been working in the No and Low Alcohol wine space (affectionately called NOLO). These products are pretty interesting. They certainly don’t have a good reputation for being tasty or wine-like, which is probably deserved to a certain extent. For a long time, these products were pretty much afterthoughts from wine companies and were either acidic water with a bit of colour or super sweet sparkling grape juice thingys suitable for children or people who don’t consume alcohol and therefore have no reference point of what actual wine tastes like.

Fast forward to about 5-10 years ago, and the birth of the ‘wellness’ movement. Consumers started thinking about the habits they had and the lives they led and wondering if there were ways to improve their health by making small changes in their lifestyle. One of these things was decreased consumption of alcohol. Consumers still wanted to drink wine, they just wanted to lower their calorie intake by choosing wines with lower ABVs. New Zealand cornered the market early with their “Lighter” Sauvignon Blancs released around 2017, where 19 NZ producers banded together to produce a product line of Sauv Blancs that delivered all the feels and flavours of a traditional SB, but with 1/3 less alcohol. Around this time, we also started to see some early investment from large wine companies in Australia into the technology required to remove alcohol quickly and efficiently, to make wines with an ABV lower than 0.5%. You see, this technology is extremely expensive and is not the kind of thing most wineries would be able to purchase. This technology is called a Spinning Cone Column, and it is a distillation unit that operates under a strong vacuum. Now traditional distillation works by heating up a solution with ethanol in it and allowing the ethanol to boil off, as its boiling point is lower than water by about 25 degrees. So the ethanol turns to a gas and is funneled to another part of the apparatus where it is then cooled, and it condenses back into a liquid – your alcohol fraction. This was designed to distil alcohol off wine or apple cider or fermented pears or whatever had been fermented, and the goal was to collect the alcohol and throw away what the alcohol had come out of – which in the case of brandy in particular – was wine. However, if you want to keep the leftover dealcoholised wine, this method is not going to work. You literally cook the wine by heating it to 75 degrees, so it’s effectively ruined after this process. Now if we can replicate this distillation under a strong vacuum, the atmospheric pressure is significantly reduced, which in turn lowers the boiling point of ethanol (and water for that matter). What this means is now you can “boil” the ethanol off a wine at around 35 degrees, which is way more gentle on the left-over wine. It’s pretty amazing technology, and it actually is an Australian invention – developed by the CSIRO in the 60’s, and the machines are still made by an Australian company based in Griffith, NSW.

Ok – so now we can remove the alcohol from wine without completely destroying the wine. Progress. However, there is another big problem. In fact, there are a couple problems. Big ones. Problem 1: Most of the volatile aroma/flavour compounds come out into the alcohol fraction. Translation – almost all of the flavour compounds come out of the wine with the alcohol, leaving the remaining delacoholised wine with pretty much no aroma and flavour. Problem 2: the remaining dealcoholised wine now tastes like acidic water, and nothing like wine. Alcohol as a chemical compound provides texture, warmth, viscosity, body, and palate weight among other things, and once you take it out the remaining dealcoholised wine simply doesn’t taste like wine anymore. It is no longer vinous. And trust me when I say we’ve found nothing (so far) that you can add back that replicates that mouthfeel effect of alcohol.

So to recap – we have dealcoholised our wine using a SCC and while the resulting leftover wine is not cooked into oblivion, it is aromaless and flavourless acid water. This is where my research kicks in.

I’ve spent the past five years working on all of the facets of production of these products. From treatments in the vineyard to winery processing specific to NOLO wines, to optimising the actual dealcoholisation process, to storage and shelf life. And I’d have to say that it’s pretty gratifying research to do, because it is all so new. Every time we try something different we learn something new, because there really hasn’t been any research done in this space, ever.

Now, I’m going to take off my researcher hat, and put my winemaker hat on. These products, as far as I’m concerned, are not wine. Or more precisely, they do not offer me the same things that traditional wine does. When you remove the alcohol from a wine, you remove the soul of that wine, and it becomes a beverage. It no longer tastes like it comes from a particular place. It is now a beverage, based on wine, that can replace the experience of drinking wine in a social experience, or a choice for someone who can’t drink alcohol, or someone who has to drive the car home and wants an adult beverage with no booze. But it is not wine. Fermentation is a key element to wine, and the alcohol produced by that fermentation is essential for me to call something wine.

To this point, we have not been able to recreate a dealcoholised wine that replicates the sensory experience of traditional wine. And I don’t know if we ever will. I do know we are going to get closer and closer as time goes on, and we’ll figure out the keys to building mouthfeel and texture without ethanol. But I’m not sure I’ll ever choose to drink these products. Wine for me is not just a beverage. It is a story in a bottle. It transports me to a place and time where that product was made, and that experience can never be replicated. It’s like a time machine in a way. Wine will never be a commodity for me. Never ‘just a beverage’. But I know that most people in the world don’t feel the same way. For most people, wine is a beverage. It tastes good, goes with food, gets them a bit tipsy, and is an enjoyable experience. No and Low alcohol wines are a legitimate proposition for those people when they don’t want to drink alcohol but still want to drink wine. These types of reliable and repeatable products – with alcohol or not, are most of the wines that are produced in the world. But that’s not the types of wines we like, and it’s definitely not the types of wines we make. Our wines come from a specific time and place and could come from no other. And that’s the way we like it.