The Bottles I Popped on New Year's Eve

Three really good alcohol-free sparkling wines (and wine-like beverages)

Happy 2023! I hope that, so far, it has felt however you hoped it would.

Mine has been just as quiet as was last night, when my fiancé and I ate...a lot of cheese. Then, he deboned a little striped bass and flattened it to fry as a kind of Milanese and I made an endive salad with a simple shallot vinaigrette to go with it.

Of course, I was also on beverage duty. Here are the three bottles we completely killed, just the two of us, in the order that we drank them.

French Bloom's Le Blanc

Co-founded by model Constance Jablonski and Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger, the Michelin Guide’s international development manager, with help from Maggie's husband, Rodolphe Frerejean Taittinger (yes, that Taittinger) and Carl Héline, the former head of Krug in the U.S., there's clearly some sparkling wine know-how behind French Bloom. "Research and development took a little more than two years," Maggie told me when I Zoomed with her and Rodolfe about a month ago. "We did something like 70, maybe 100 iterations before we arrived at a product that we felt met our expectations."

So far, the team has produced a blanc and a rosé, both of which I first tasted with Héline (who, by the way, is an absolute gentleman) at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan. It says something that Bemelmans is pouring this product, and it says even more that it's served at the Royal Champagne Hôtel among other prestigious hotels and restaurants in France. “A lot of people in Champagne, which is very strict, have been looking at me with a lot of... It was provocative for them,” Rodolphe said. "For us, it's a little victory" for French Bloom to be taken more seriously now, especially in that region.

Indeed, Maggie added, though the product is made and bottled in France, the U.K. market is known to be more mature, and so they planned to launch French Bloom at Selfridges last January. But then, to her surprise, someone from France's Grande Épicerie reached out and asked if they might want to launch there in October instead. “We took a gamble, and we were all shocked," said Maggie. "We sold something like 10,000 bottles in the first three months, just in France.”

But back to the liquid: The base for both products is the same, dealcoholized Chardonnay with some natural lemon aroma—and aroma is what stands out for me about this product. (In addition to the dealcoholized Chardonnay, French Bloom's rosé also contains some Pinot Noir grape juice.) Often, with dealcoholized wines, you'll get either no nose or an aggressive, synthetic nose. The experience you get from sipping a glass of French Bloom's blanc is one of natural, elegant citrus and mango aromas. This is difficult to achieve, and the team should really be commended for getting there.

While I think there's still a little tweaking to be done—acidity is definitely present, but I want a little more of it, especially if this is meant to be a stand-in for Champagne, and while I enjoyed drinking the blanc, this morning I'm struggling to recall what flavors really stuck with me—I like French Bloom's approach. The team has high standards, serious skill and savvy, and they feel strongly about using 100% organic ingredients and avoiding any added sugars, colorants, preservatives, or sulfites. Overall, the future looks quite promising for this brand.

Raumland’s "Zerozzante" Traube Rhabarber

Next came my favorite new discovery, and my favorite bottle of the night (and perhaps the year): Raumland's cold-pressed rhubarb and white wine grape juice. The sparkling wine brand, a German family business founded in 1984 by Volker Raumland and now carried forward by his daughters, produces three alcohol-free products (at least three that I know of, which are available here in the U.S.) and I bought them all from Delmosa last week.

I haven't tried the other two, the Bacchus grape or the apple-grape, but the grape-rhubarb tastes exactly as Delmosa owner Bruce Blosil describes it on his site: "fresh berries, tangy rhubarb, restrained sweetness balanced with bright acidity." My fiancé, who has tasted almost everything with me over the past couple of years, agreed that, while there's some sweetness to this drink, it's not overpowering, first because of the balancing tartness of the rhubarb juice, but also because of the palate-cleansing, Champagne-like bubbles. "Some of the other drinks we've had coated my mouth with the sugar, but this was so refreshing, it didn't weigh down my palate," he said. "It's just a very well-executed product."

Agreed. In fact, it's safe to say that this is one of the ten best alcohol-free products I've ever tasted, and I will try to always keep a bottle or two at the ready.

Jörg Geiger's Birnenschaumwein

Finally, an old standby: Jörg Geiger's alcohol-free sparkling wine made from Champagner-Bratbirne pears. Unlike the Zerozzante, this pear juice is fermented in the bottle for three years and then gently dealcoholized. Whatever is unlocked by fermentation definitely comes through in the final product, which is 65% dealcoholized pear wine and the rest is fresh pear juice, herbs and spices, carbonic acid, and sulfites. (At least this is what a Google translation of the ingredients listed on the bottle in German tells me.) Once again, Blosil nailed it with the tasting notes: Champagne pear, white flowers, brioche, subtle tannins, a semi-dry finish. It paired nicely with the crispy fish and bitter greens.

Was it a lot of sparkling juice? Yes. And it was great. And there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy any of these bottles any day of the year.

Because my birthday comes five days after January 1—yes, what used to be such a sweet little date is now tainted by the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, forever linked to the insurrectionists—I tend to save my reflections and revelations for it. This year, I'll turn 40, and I’m feeling welcoming towards the new decade.

In my 30s, there were highs—publishing a podcast and a book that made impacts, getting to love and be loved by the best man, learning to accept help, meeting impressive and wonderfully peculiar people, experiencing great tenderness, moving closer to what I hope will be a fulfilling career, enjoying the hottest version of my physical self (somewhere around 33)—but also lows. I lost people who I thought were locked into my life and my social world waned in ways I didn’t want it to. My sense of identity weakened. I struggled with jealousy and judgment and deeply low self-worth.

I wish I could write something more gratitude-y, but this feels like the truth of where I am today. So, here’s looking forward to my 40s, even if they will be in some ways lonelier than previous decades. I’m going to try to connect more with nature (and less with social media), work on my writing, love harder, treat my body more kindly, remain earnest (that part, I like about myself), serve others, and be a more skilled cultivator of positivity.

Onward. xo JVB