Wine Harvest: Where Great Non-Alcoholic Wine Begins

It’s harvest time...

Across the Northern Hemisphere, vineyards are busy with what is probably the most important few weeks of the winemaking year. Grapes are being tasted, tested and picked, wineries are filling up with fruit, and another vintage is beginning to take shape.

And if you’ve ever wondered how non-alcoholic wine is actually made, harvest is a pretty good place to start.

We talk a lot about dealcoholisation and the technology used to remove alcohol from wine. But that comes much later.

Before you can make great non-alcoholic wine, you have to make great wine.

And great wine starts with the grapes.

So, when is wine harvest?

There isn’t one set date.

In the weeks leading up to harvest, winemakers spend a lot of time in the vineyard, tasting grapes and watching how they develop. Sugar levels matter, but so do acidity, flavour, tannins, weather and the overall health of the fruit.

Picking too early can mean grapes without enough flavour or maturity. Leave them too long and you can lose acidity while sugar levels continue to rise.

Finding that sweet spot is part science, part experience — and one of the biggest decisions a winemaker makes all year.

Different grapes ripen at different times too. Fruit destined for sparkling wine is often picked earlier, when acidity is still high, while some red varieties can hang on the vine considerably longer.

So harvest isn't really a single event. At many wineries, it can stretch over several busy weeks.

What happens when the grapes reach the winery?

This is when things really start moving.

For white wine, the grapes are generally pressed and the juice separated from the skins before fermentation. With red wine, the juice usually ferments with the skins, which is where much of its colour, flavour and tannin comes from.

Then yeast gets to work, converting the natural sugars in the grapes into alcohol.

From there, the winemaker makes countless decisions. Fermentation temperature, extraction, blending, tanks versus barrels, oak, ageing — all of these choices help shape the finished wine.

Some wines are made to be fresh and enjoyed relatively young. Others might spend months or even years developing in barrel or bottle.

And here's the important part:

Dealcoholisation hasn't happened yet.

Is non-alcoholic wine actually fermented?

Yes.

And this is still one of the biggest misconceptions we hear about non-alcoholic wine.

The wines we work with start their lives as wine. Grapes are harvested, pressed and fermented. The resulting wine develops its aromas, acidity, texture and structure through the winemaking process and, depending on the producer, may also be blended, aged in oak or given time in bottle.

Only after that is the alcohol carefully removed.

So non-alcoholic wine isn't simply fancy grape juice. It's wine that has been made and fermented, then dealcoholised.

And that distinction matters.

Because even the best dealcoholisation technology in the world can't magically create quality that wasn't there to begin with.

Great alcohol-free wine starts before the alcohol is removed

This is one of the changes we're most excited about in the wine world right now.

As the quality of non-alcoholic wine has improved, producers have started thinking differently about how they make it.

Rather than making a traditional wine and deciding at the end that they'd like to remove the alcohol, some winemakers are thinking about the final dealcoholised wine right from the beginning.

That can influence the grape varieties they choose, when they harvest, the acidity they want to preserve, how much they extract from red grapes, how they use oak and even how different parcels are blended.

In other words, the question is changing from:

How do we remove the alcohol from this wine?

to:

How do we make a great wine knowing we're eventually going to remove the alcohol?

That might sound like a small distinction, but we think it's an important one.

Why harvest still matters

It's easy to look at the recent progress in non-alcoholic wine and focus entirely on technology.

And there's no question that better dealcoholisation has helped transform the category.

But technology is only part of the story.

The most exciting producers we're working with are taking the wine itself increasingly seriously. The vineyard matters. The fruit matters. Harvest timing matters. Fermentation, blending and ageing matter.

The alcohol might eventually leave the bottle, but all of those decisions stay behind.

That's why we get excited about harvest.

Right now, grapes are coming off vines across Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Some will become wines we'll be tasting relatively soon. Others might not find their way into a bottle for quite some time.

And somewhere amongst them could be the next alcohol-free wine that completely surprises us.

We'll have to wait and see.

But one thing hasn't changed:

Whether there's alcohol in the finished bottle or not, great wine still starts with great grapes.