The importance (or not) of alcohol

By Roberto Lo Russo

“Wine without alcohol is not wine!” were used to yell most of the people until not so long time ago. Because, as the most erudite sommelier were saying “if the ABV is lower than 9% you can’t even call it wine, as per law!”.

Those people were used to, past tense, therefore in the past compared to today. Nowadays the mood is not much more relaxed, let’s be clear about this. At least, from yelling as during a riot, now seems more a fair protest.

But what are the reasons for this very slightly higher tolerance? Let’s have a look!

An old trend

To be fair with chronology, let’s start remind that likely some of the major opponent of this “new” trend might have realized that it is not so recent, as it dates back in 2004 the first OIV (International Organization of Vine and Wine) resolution to regulate low-alcohol wines. To be honest, at that time, the maximum allowed reduction was a mere 2%.

Few other opponents that had been lucky enough not to see their certainties retroactively cut off in 2004, pushing further their fights against this horrible stuff of no-alcohol wines, they had to give up in 2012 when a new OIV resolution raised the limit of alcohol reduction up to 20%.

The very last opponents, still convinced that wine with low alcohol cannot be called wine, had to raise white flag and definitely surrender in front of the European Council that, in 2021, modified an agriculture products EU law including low-alcohol wines within the official definition of “wine”.

Open minds and closed minds

And then? What happened? Something very simple, yet very descriptive of modern times we’re all living in: a proportion of people simply built up a concrete wall facing the progress, the changes in terms of taste and consumption; others opened up their mind and decided to deep dive into the topic, studying, discovering, evaluating.

The world changes. Along with it, people change, their habits and their uses. Tastes change as well. History teaches us that through the centuries – or even within few decades – tastes and trends changed very often, sometimes with major differences.

The trends that instruct

Let’s take the trend of the 1990s and first 2000s when global appreciation was used to prize strong and bold red wines, so concentrated to be able to be squeezed, as complex as a book of molecular chemistry, so alcoholic to make you tipsy just reading the label, over-oaked in barrel so full of aromas that without the word “wine” on the label one could have had the impression to drink a pie. These wines were appreciated by everyone, from critics to consumers and producers (that were listening to the critics and the consumers…).

At some point someone started to get tired of this style and slowly the same style started loosing appeal, giving way to more subtle wines, lighter, more elegant, less aggressive and less showing-off their muscles, more keen to please the palate.

Do you recognize yourself? If so, let’s go back to the previous paragraph, the one that recap all this story in one single sentence: tastes change.

Natural tendency

Low-alcohol wines (legally speaking, those above 0.5% ABV, but typically the vast majority sits between 7 and 9% ABV) are anything but the next step of the more widespread trend of more delicate and palate-friendly wines. No-alcohol wines, those below 0.5% ABV are possibly a little world apart from low-alcohol.

On the technologies used to reduce alcohol in wines are tons of pages easily available on the web, therefore I decided we can skip this topic here.

It’s worth instead try to understand what can we possibly expect to experience once these wines are poured into the glass.

Into the glass

If nowadays available technologies promise to keep the entire – or almost entire – aromatic profile of the wines as alcohol is taken away, reality is that the loss of aromatics are still quite high in proportion, to the point that sometimes the specificity of the grape varieties is jeopardized. To balance this loss of aromatics, the vast majority of grape varieties used for this style of wines are those with a quite high aromatic intensity (Sauvignon blanc, Riesling, Muller-Thurgau, among others).

Alcohol brings along a series of aromatic and tasting features, contributing to body and roundness thanks to its sweet-like taste. Reducing alcohol proportion therefore, wine tends to highlight more bitterness and lightness on the palate; the typical solution to balance this shift in taste is the addition of sugar, with the outcome of a wine with a level of residual sugar clearly perceivable, still remaining within the limits of dryness. Historically Italian consumer doesn’t love such wines with residual sugar, much more appreciated in a number of countries, either within EU or extra-EU

Reduction of alcohol in red wines faces one more limit: the highlight of tannins which, if not properly balanced, can reach a its rejection limit.

From a legislation point of view, wines with reduced alcohol are those within 0.5% and the minimum ABV stated in the production regulation of the considered wine, but looking at the reality of the market it looks like most of this products sit between 6% and 8% ABV as fair compromise between alcohol containment and preservation of tasting profile.

Wine or fruit juice?

It seems however being one more explanation for this value: from a pure psychologic point of view, a lower ABV than this would make the wine closer to a juice (or even soft drink altogether) rather that to the wine category, making it losing its socializing feature (along with other alcoholic drinks). Furthermore we can say that, generally speaking, the consumer match a lower ABV with lower value which turns in its willingness to pay less than what it would pay for a “full alcoholic” beverage.

The winners, so far

The style of No-Lo that, so far, seems stronger from a consumer perception point of view is that of sparkling wines, most likely as some RS in these wines has been always accepted and appreciated (let’s just think of extra-dry category of many Charmat-stlyle sparklings). Sparkling wines can also use CO2 as leverage to enhance the mouthfeel on the palate, balancing the generic loss of body given by alcohol taken away. Not to mention the general global trend that has seen sparkling wines on top of worldwide preferences in the last few years.

What future will bring? Looking at the numbers, No-Lo trend achieves more and more successes as time goes by, with increasingly interest by consumers but also attracting big investments by top producers at each corner of the world.

In Italy investments are on the rise too, but it seems that consumer response in raising slower than other countries, as it was predictable anyway.

The consumer response itself deserves a specific discussion, so we’ll talk about this in a next article!