Perhaps the non-alcoholic alternative for wine drinkers should not be a wine at all, but a different sip altogether? We slurp through some likely candidates …
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fter my positive pregnancy test eight years ago, the first thing I did was buy an industrial quantity of the non-alcoholic aperitivo Crodino, which is something of a negroni dupe for bitters hounds. There are plenty of really good, alcohol-free cocktail options nowadays, and beer drinkers, too, are amply catered for in the non-alcoholic department – but what of wine?
I may sound like an old fart, but for me, at 41, the pleasure of drinking wine is more about a sense of occasion than the stuff’s mind-altering qualities. (Collagen and social inhibition, I have discovered, wane in tandem.) So the challenge for wine drinkers who aren’t drinking is to find a proxy to sip and enjoy in the same way. Something that comes in a wine bottle. Something you drink from a glass with a stem. Something that works with food. Something that isn’t Shloer.
There are, of course, lots of dealcoholised wines (in which the alcohol and, frankly, flavour is removed after fermentation), but, given that they’re made to cater to a growing cohort of people who are drinking less – that is, responding to a mass market need – I suspect many are made with cheap, intensively grown fruit. No, the kind of substitute I’m after is a drink designed to be good in its own right: not a wine tribute band, but a different act altogether.
