Learn About Wine

Photo Credit: E&K Winery So, how is alcohol free wine made if there’s no fermentation stage or aging or residual sugar and all that mess? Well, actually there is all that mess. Non alcoholic wine goes through all the processes of normal winemaking, but then goes through a reverse distilling process. When you distill liquor you heat the mash and trap the vapor that is released. This then cools back to a liquid as alcohol. Then you throw out the mash. With making alcohol free wines the same process is used, but instead of discarding the wine must and keeping the alcohol, you discard the alcohol and bottle the juice. The thing about alcohol free wines is that they aren’t 100% alcohol free. I think they call that a misnomer. The preferred term by the few wine makers producing these wines is dealcoholized wines, as the wines still contain a trace amount of alcohol. The same term applies to “non-alcoholic wine”. The actual percentage of alcohol in a dealcoholized wine is about 0.5 percent.

Posted in Wine Education 1 Comment »