2023-05-06 20:30:55
BarcelonaA revolution is approaching in the wineries. If alcohol-free beer has been a common product in supermarket aisles for many years, alcohol-free wine is on its way to being a reality at your table. Market trends already indicate that change is taking place; consumption habits are constantly changing and for years healthier nutrition is leading many people to rethink what they put in their stomachs. And alcohol is no exception.
In Catalonia, as in the rest of southern Europe, wine has a cultural and prestigious component that beer does not. That is why it has been more difficult for the consumption of de-alcoholized wine to reach the levels of other drinks. According to a report published last year by Wine Intelligence, there is a global trend among consumers, “especially younger ones”, to reduce alcohol consumption, which has meant that sales of soft drinks have been growing.
Technically, “wine without alcohol does not exist”, explains Fernando Zamora, professor at the Faculty of Enology at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV). The essential process in winemaking is that the sugar in the grapes ferments and gives rise to alcohol. Therefore, a wine without alcohol is a contradiction; to be exact, it should be named drink derived from wine.
There are two techniques for de-alcoholizing wine. The first is by evaporating the alcohol by putting the wine under vacuum at low temperatures. The problem with this method is that the wine “loses aromas” – says Zamora – although they can be recovered by passing the steam through condensation columns that allow both the aroma and the pure alcohol to be recovered, which the wineries can resell . Evaporative techniques are the only ones that allow you to leave a wine with less than 0.1% alcohol.
The second way, says Zamora, is passing the wine through a membrane at “very high pressure” that lets water and alcohol pass while “retaining the rest of the substances” that make up the wine. Once this process is done, water is added again without the alcohol.
Experts say that, to be precise, non-alcoholic wine should be called a ‘drink derived from wine’
As with other drinks, such as beer or spirits, the regulations require the product to be labeled differently according to the amount of alcohol: if a wine has less than 1% alcohol, it can carry the label “without alcohol”, while there is another label, the one of 0.0% (called zero-zero in the food sector), which means that the amount of alcohol is less than 0.1%, which is negligible at a practical level. “An orange juice or a yogurt can also have a little alcohol”, because the product has a small fermentation naturally during production or inside the container, remembers Zamora.
How does this process affect the taste? With de-alcoholization “you always lose something”, says Zamora, since “alcohol is part of the taste of wine”. That’s why producers often add some sugar or other sweeteners to non-alcoholic wines, to compensate for the fact that the alcohol is sweet. When there is no alcohol, they can seem more acidic and, in the case of the reds, “more bitter”, recalls the URV oenologist.
Despite this, Zamora believes that alcohol-free wines “are progressing very well”. Twenty years ago, alcohol-free beer had a bad reputation, while now “there are some that are really good,” he recalls, a path that de-alcoholized wine is also following.
In Catalonia there are a few wineries that offer alcohol-free wines. One of the pioneers was Bodegas Torres, which has the Natureo range, with a white, a red, a rosé and a sparkling wine. Likewise, Bodegas Maset also has two sparkling wines, one white and one rosé, de-alcoholized.
When there is no alcohol, the wine can seem more acidic and, in the case of red, more bitter”
The country’s two largest producers of cava, Freixenet and Codorníu, have been offering non-alcoholic sparkling wines for years (if they don’t have alcohol they can’t be called cava). “There is a segment of the market that is looking for drinks with an organoleptic [aspecte, gust i olor] similar to alcoholic drinks for social or relaxing moments, but who prefers to drink less alcohol”, point out Freixenet sources consulted by Emprenem about the decision to bring their first alcohol-free wines to the market in 2011. “There is a lot of demand from the consumer, and more and more,” they indicate. So, Freixenet wants to “respond to new health habits, new consumption trends and new audiences” in a segment of the market that is “growing exponential” every year.
Spain is the fourth producer of de-alcoholized wine in the world, although in sales to other countries it rises to second position. In the State, “a lot of alcohol-free wine is made, but it is not sold in Spain, but almost everything is exported”, comments Zamora. In fact, in terms of market share, in 2020 Spain represented 3% of the total sales of alcohol-free wine in the world, far from the first places: the United Kingdom, with 24%, followed by France, the United States and Germany , with 17%, 16% and 13%, respectively, according to Wine Intelligence.
But, as Zamora points out, production is one thing and consumption is another, and here there is still a lot of room for expansion for Catalan producers. According to data from Idescat – the statistical agency of the Generalitat –, Catalan families spent 4.1 million euros on alcohol-free wine in 2021, the latest with available data and still marked by the pandemic. In 2019, the last before the arrival of covid, the expenditure was 6.5 million euros, figures well below the expenditure on traditional wine, which in 2021 was 350 million euros.
Data from the Wine Intelligence report corroborates the figures at a Spanish level: in 2020, less than 0.25% of all wine consumed in Spain was alcohol-free, in contrast to beer, where de-alcoholized options were already more than 6% of the total liters consumed. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Finland or Belgium, de-alcoholized wine was already close to 1% of the total.
In Spain in 2020 only 0.25% of the wine consumed was without alcohol, far from the 6% of beer 0.0
The difference between non-alcoholic wine and beer, beyond the cultural weight of wine in our society, also has health-related connotations. A common belief among many people is that wine has health benefits, especially for people with cardiovascular problems. “For a few years, it was said that a glass of wine a day had antioxidants,” recalls Roser Martí, president of the College of Dietitians-Nutritionists of Catalonia, about these supposed health benefits of wine. However, experts dispel this myth and remind, instead, that alcohol has negative effects in many diseases, particularly with cancer or liver ailments.
“We can see wine, we don’t have to feel guilty, but we just need to know that when they tell us it’s good, that’s not the case – adds Martí -. Alcohol is a toxin that the body has to eliminate, while antioxidants can be obtained by eating fruits and vegetables,” he says. Therefore, the nutritionist concludes that “if wine is consumed, it should be sporadically and in moderation”, and “it should not be for the antioxidant benefits it can provide”, as this could “lead to an excess” which would be harmful for health
In this aspect, alcohol-free wine has a lot of room to run, because it allows you to continue drinking it without having to suffer from the harmful effect of alcohol. It remains to be seen whether this growth has a ceiling and whether, in the near future, alcohol-free wine becomes another element of the shopping basket.
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