Joval Wines recently launched Zero Hour Prosecco, and The Shout spoke to Joval’s Head of Product Development, Kate Lawton, about the challenges and progress in non-alcoholic wine, and the importance of consumer education.
Unlike many non-alcoholic spirits or beers, there is an additional challenge in making non-alcoholic wine – you have to make a wine first, and then remove the alcohol. The technology behind removing alcohol from wine is still developing and improving, but in some cases the process isn’t particularly kind to the wine, which may be sending consumers to other non-alc products.
“Totally,” Lawton said, “because they probably have tried products out there that aren’t very good, and once you spend 15, 20, maybe more dollars on a product and you’ve been burnt once or twice, you really start to think, ‘I’ll just buy a bottle of San Pellegrino or a fruity mocktail’ or whatever it is, rather than keep trying this product.
“But the technology is improving. I started looking at this project about two years ago and even in that time the amount of innovation has been extraordinary.
“We know the tech will continue to evolve and improve because the numbers are out there: Gen Z are just not drinking as much anymore; so the wine world is looking around a little anxiously. We know it’s where the future’s at, so I think that’s why we put so much time and energy in this space – for the betterment of the whole category.”
Lawton explained why non-alc wine is different and why it has to be de-alcoholised rather than simply made with no alcohol.
“Inherently wine is made by making alcohol from grapes. There is fermentation from other fruits, but in wine that fermentation has to happen. Wine drinkers are looking for wine characteristics and that’s where the challenge lies. The consumer expectation of wine is much higher than an RTD drinker, or even a beer drinker, in terms of what they are looking for in that glass.
“When we take a product out into the on-trade, these venues are spoiled for choice in the world of wine, and in particular in Australian wine, so there is just a really heightened expectation of what a product should taste like.”
Category improvement
Lawton added that as consumers see improvements in non-alcoholic beer and spirits, the expectation is that wine should follow suit, despite the greater challenges involved.
“I think there’s still a really big job to be done in educating consumers. But, as the products get better and bigger producers spend more money on getting products out there and the messaging, then that will just help the category overall.”
In highlighting some of the challenges behind bringing a new non-alcoholic wine to market, Lawton told The Shout: “There were many times where I thought ‘I’m just not making this’, but my boss was rightly convinced that we should have a non-alcoholic wine offering in our portfolio. This sent us on a journey of discovery and we started off looking at still wines as well, but I moved away from that quite quickly because I just didn’t think we could get the right level of quality at this stage.
“I think we could have got something passable, but passable is not what we want. Wine is our thing so it has to be something that stacks up. And that is where we landed, I’m 20 years in the wine industry and I 100 per cent stand behind this product.”
Lawton explained that, like many others working in the non-alc wine space, she couldn’t go into too much detail on the technology, but said Joval’s approach is based on vacuum distillation rather than spinning cone.
“We found that the spinning cone stripped away too much character, and that the vacuum distillation gave us, particularly with Prosecco, a better end product.”
She added that while this technology could work for still wines, “I just don’t think it meets that same quality threshold… yet.”
She said: “We are looking at those varieties that lend themselves better, so those varieties that are not so big and structured.”
It has to ‘pop’
Looking at the overall non-alcoholic drinks space, Lawton said that while retail is still driving the most volume, every on-premise venue now needs to have a zero-alc wine product.
“Not everybody is drinking it, but somebody will be drinking so they have to have an offering.
“I also thought there was an opportunity with the branding to really create more of a celebration around people’s choice not to drink, lean into that mindset and make it more of a movement. This wine is something that people will be happy to take to an occasion, it’s not screaming zero-alc, but we wanted to make the look of the product more aspirational.
“We put it under a cork to make sure people have that moment [of the cork pop]. We thought a crown would have been a bit sad, definitely no validation there, but you can turn up to an occasion with your friends, have that happy moment and then it’s secondary that it has got no alcohol.”
One of the big challenges wine faces is bringing younger, legal-age drinkers into a category that can be confusing, slightly daunting, and one where you don’t want to be the person asking a ‘dumb’ question. Lawton said that this means there needs to be more education around what a non-alcoholic wine is, and what it is all about.
“I think this is what has given rise to spritzes and RTDs because it’s easier… there’s a real confidence in just ordering a spritz.
“You know what you’re getting. It’s not like going into a bar and ordering say a Pinot Noir. There’s so much variety in just that. So ‘a Pinot Noir from where’ might be the first question you get back and suddenly someone’s got to think about it. They’ve got to have a certain base level of knowledge to answer that question.
“No one’s going to ask you ‘a spritz from where?’ It’s simple. I think there’s definitely that sort of level of education but with this product we’re trying to make it simple and it is not about you needing to know too much. Just know that if you like Prosecco but you want Prosecco without any alcohol this will work.
“Zero Hour isn’t just another bottle on the shelf – it’s a benchmark for what premium zero-alcohol wines can be.”