Last week we had a houseguest. Jan is a very close friend of
ours: she was vacationing with Melanie, who was to become my wife,
when we first met in Monterey. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan
(slogan:
”
Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo!
”
) and gets to California to see us roughly once a year.
Last week we had a houseguest. Jan is a very close friend of ours: she was vacationing with Melanie, who was to become my wife, when we first met in Monterey. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan (slogan: “Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo!”) and gets to California to see us roughly once a year.
We reciprocate about that often, but I’ve put my foot down about going to Michigan in the winter. Anyway, Jan had just returned from chaperoning her son Kyle and his high school chums on their senior trip to Puerto Vallarta. (My, my, how times change. My Battle Creek, Mich., high school senior trip was a two-hour bus ride to the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit with a brown bag lunch. Now they go partying at all-inclusive resorts in Mexico. Sheesh.)
The poor girl somehow got herself a vicious case of Montezuma’s revenge, one so severe that her physician prescribed an industrial strength antibiotic with a nasty side-effect. If she allowed any alcohol to pass her lips, she would become violently ill.
Having recently been violently ill (from the revenge), Jan had no desire to be so again, and was wisely abstaining for the duration of the course of her treatment. Unfortunately, that period of time coincided with her visit here. She and Melanie love to get together over a glass of wine, discuss their lives and laugh like loons. So to accommodate her, we went on a hunt for non-alcoholic wine.
There are two brands that immediately come to mind: Ariel and Fre. Both are owned by large wineries, Ariel by J. Lohr, and Fre by Sutter Home, which is in turn owned by Trinchero Family Estates of St. Helena. Each label produces several varietals.
Ariel has three reds and three whites: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and “Rouge,” Chardonnay, White Zinfandel and “Blanc.” In addition, there is one Ariel sparkling wine, Brut Cuvee. In the Fre corner are seven choices: White Zin, Chardonnay, Merlot, “Premium Red,” “Premium White” and two sparklers, a brut and a spumante.
While all of these wines are sold as “alcohol free,” they in fact contain as much as one-half of one percent alcohol by volume. That may not seem like much, but it was enough for our cautious friend Jan to take a pass. So she made a big dent in my Lemon Zinger sun tea supply. We served it to her in our best Riedel wine glasses. Guess what? Those two still laughed like loons.
So all of this made me wonder: “just how do they make that stuff, anyway?” The answer surprised me, because the wine is not made without alcohol. That would be impossible, really, since alcohol is a by-product of the fermentation process that gives wine its character. Rather, the wine is made in the traditional way, and then the alcohol is extracted. Each of the wineries under discussion utilizes a different patented process.
The procedure for making Fre has a very fun-sounding name. It’s the “Spinning Cone Column.” Sounds like a ride at Great America. Ariel utilizes the more staid “Cold Filtration Process.” They do essentially the same thing in that they reduce the wine to a syrupy concentrate, remove the alcohol and then add water to bring it back to a drinkable concentration.
Fre claims that its method is superior because the spinning cones collect the wine’s “fragile aroma and flavor essences” at the beginning of the process and then reintroduces them later, after the alcohol is removed. Ariel’s process, also known as “reverse osmosis,” leaves the aromas and essences alone, and processes the whole shebang.
What does this stuff taste like? In the interest of the public good, I took it upon myself to buy a couple of bottles, give them a taste and report the results. Melanie and I purchased a bottle each of Fre Merlot and Ariel Blanc and proceeded to do something we would never normally do: taste wine in the middle of a work day.
We started with the Blanc. Ariel’s literature tells us that the wine is made with 85 percent premium Chardonnay and 15 percent White Riesling grapes. The tasting notes proclaim “floral aromas of lilacs and jasmine combined with peach, lavender and lychee.” Well, be that as it may, to me it tastes like a Tropical Fruit Life Saver. That’s not to say it’s bad. It’s not. I happen to love Tropical Fruit Life Savers. It’s just that it doesn’t taste like wine.
Next we tried the Merlot. During the processing of this wine, unfermented juice is added to the product after the de-alcohol process “to help retain the texture of wine and its varietal character.” I hate to say it, but this stuff has none of the texture of wine or any varietal character whatsoever. Again, it’s not that it’s bad; it just lacks the depth of flavor and nuance that is present in traditional wine.
I’m sure that these products have their place. Recently, it has been shown that alcohol-free wine has all the touted benefits of regular wine, and certainly, the fact that it has about half the calories doesn’t hurt either. And if you need to limit your intake of alcohol for medical or other reasons, I suppose it’s a reasonable alternative.
But if it were me, I would probably reach for a glass of Welch’s Grape Juice. It also comes in red and white, but doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. Or I’d see if there’s any Lemon Zinger left.
