A pinot noir just won Best Red Wine, and a riesling just won Best White Wine, at a major international blind-tasting competition for alcohol-free wine. Those are two of the styles winemakers have always found hardest to get right without alcohol in the glass. Judges tasted every wine with no producer name to lean on, and picked those two wines as the best in their categories anyway.
Removing alcohol from fully fermented wine usually means running it through reverse osmosis, vacuum distillation or a spinning cone column, among other methods, all designed to strip out ethanol while preserving as much of everything else as possible. Aroma consistently takes the hit, since the same volatile compounds that carry a wine’s scent are often stripped out along with the alcohol. Body and structure can suffer too, though how much depends heavily on the technique used. That’s not a marketing problem. It’s a production problem, and for years, protecting aroma and structure has proven difficult.
A major blind tasting just rewarded the hardest styles to fake
This year’s results suggest that trade-off is starting to break down. Judges at a major international blind-tasting competition worked through entries without knowing the producer and still awarded medals to nearly 200 alcohol-free wines, spanning reds, whites, rosé and sparkling styles. Two of those medals were the top prizes in their entire style category. A pinot noir took Best Red Wine, and a riesling took Best White Wine, the same two styles widely considered hardest to dealcoholize successfully.
The US market backs up what the judges found
The judges’ verdict lines up with what’s happening in the market itself. Industry research tracking eight major wine markets found that no-alcohol wine volume in the United States grew at a 23% compound annual rate between 2019 and 2024, part of a broader wave of growth registered in all eight markets the report tracks. This is not a small blip. American demand for alcohol-free wine is growing quickly and consistently across the same tracked period.
That demand skews younger, but not evenly. Millennials make up the largest share of no- and low-alcohol wine buyers across the eight markets the same research tracks, ahead of both Gen Z and older generations. Japan and Spain break that pattern, where older consumers still lead the category instead.
Growth brought the category a harder test
The growth comes with a catch, and it’s not the one most people would guess. The same report warns that rising price sensitivity and higher expectations around taste and quality could still limit how far the category goes. Price concerns show up in almost every beverage trend. Taste and quality carrying equal weight is what’s different here, since it means the wine itself, not the price tag, decides whether the growth holds.
There’s a wrinkle in that comparison, since the same research found that most drinkers are not abandoning alcohol altogether in favor of the alcohol-free version. They are blending, choosing no-, low- and full-strength wine depending on the occasion rather than picking one lane permanently. That means alcohol-free wine isn’t just competing against traditional wine in the abstract but racing against the same drinker’s full-strength bottle, on the same night, in the same fridge, which raises the bar even further.
Drinkers are holding alcohol-free wine to the standard of the real thing now, not just the standard of an interesting substitute, and that is a harder bar to clear than the category faced even a few years ago.
This doesn’t make the trend easy to predict, but it does explain how a pinot noir and a riesling ended up winning best in style at a competition built to catch the wines that couldn’t hold up. For years, red wine and aromatic white wine were considered the hardest styles to dealcoholize successfully. This year, according to the judges who tasted them blind, two wines in exactly those styles proved otherwise.
Jennifer Allen is a retired professional chef and long-time writer. Her work appears in dozens of publications, including MSN, Yahoo, The Washington Post and The Seattle Times. These days, she’s busy in the kitchen developing recipes and traveling the world, and you can find all her best creations at Cook What You Love.
The post Alcohol-free wine sales are climbing fast, and the judges just proved why appeared first on Food Drink Life.