What's a Wine Alternative?

And is there a better term? The folks from NON are here to ponder one of this category's challenges: language

Well, well, well! A lot of people are talking about alcohol-free wine these days, whether it’s dealcoholized wine or a combination of juices, teas, herbs, vinegars, and spices meant to approximate a wine-drinking experience. (You can read my 2021 piece for the Kitchn in order to better understand the distinction.) Only two out of Punch’s five favorites fall into the former category, so while the others, such as Muri, defy easy classification, they’re being considered alcohol-free wines because they’re meant to be consumed like wine. Fair.

Still, calling them wine doesn't feel quite right. Like in the Punch piece, the author of this Robb Report story acknowledges that “[t]he category is still so new for these non-wine ‘wines’ that no classifying name has yet stuck.” (Full disclosure: Although I wasn’t mentioned in the piece, I connected the author with some of the people featured and I gave some of my general thoughts on the category for background.)

This is something I think about a lot, both for alcohol-free wine and alcohol-free cocktails. As my friend Jordana Rothman put it years ago, the nomenclature on beverage menus is “a thicket of awkwardness.” (Still gives me a chuckle.)

The issue came up in January at an Eleven Madison Park dinner celebrating the U.S. arrival of NON, a Melbourne-based brand of wine alternatives. I was seated next to Rajiv Ravalia, a consultant for the brand, who shared with me some of the company’s internal debates about marketing and messaging. The next day, I asked NON founder Aaron Trotman and global head of sales Rishi Ravalia (who is, yes, Raj’s brother), if they would talk about it more with me, sort of lifting the curtain. In my mind, the questions that those who are fully immersed in this world of nonalc are grappling with, in regards to defining and talking about it, are fascinating and worth being made public. So, if you’re a geek like I am, please find an edited and condensed version of our conversation after the jump.

Before I get there, I want to say that I’ve been in touch with members of the NON team since 2020 and they’re generally lovely—and a good bit of fun, too. Worth mentioning if you, like I, care about buying from good people.

Onward!

Aaron, we’ve talked about this before, but for the record: What is NON?

Trotman: NON is a nonalcoholic drink made by chefs. At some point, the nonalcoholic category has to stop mimicking other drinks like spirits or beer, but consumers need a jumping-off point. At what point do people no longer need that? I’m not sure. Another question I ask myself: What if you don’t like the taste of wine? We’re alienating potential customers by using the “wine alternative” language. But where do you get them to start? How do you, as a business and a brand, help them to understand quickly what vessel you drink it in, which is in a wine glass, et cetera?

Ravalia: I’ve been here since the beginning, right when Seedlip started. [Ravalia worked for Seedlip in a variety of roles, from consultant to market manager to head of sales in a number of regions, from 2017 to 2021.] When we started talking to consumers about Seedlip, they were outraged. People would come up to me and say, “You can’t do this. How can you be a nonalc spirit?” And my question to them was, “Do you know what an alcoholic spirit is?” They just said, “The spirit is alcohol.” And I said, “But you don’t get alcohol from trees. Do you know how it’s made?” And they had absolutely no idea. But once you explain how an alcoholic spirit is made and then how Seedlip is made, the comparison is there. So, explaining what Seedlip was was difficult enough, let alone creating a new word. Frankly, it was also difficult for Seedlip to think about what it was if it didn’t relate to the spirits world, because the process was very similar. [As British wine critic Jancis Robinson has put it, “Seedlip is a nonalcoholic spirit—a spirit in the broader sense of the word, i.e. a distillate. It’s made by distilling individual botanicals...and blending them into a final elixir.”]

The nonalc beer thing, you either get dealcoholized beers or you get... There’s a brand in Australia called Sobah. You could just call it an adult soft drink because it’s alcohol-free and kids don’t like it, but if you ask Clinton and Lozen [the couple behind in the brand], “Is this a soft drink?” They’ll go, “Well no, soft drinks are syrups with carbonated water.” It’s not sexy. For them to call Sobah nonalc beer or a beer alternative is an easy way to say, “It plays in the beer space.”

So, now we come into wine and the space in which NON operates. But also, it’s worth noting that there’s a lot to do with timing here. For example, we launched a Seedlip ready-to-drink in 2020 and it flopped. A year later, a load of other brands did it and it took off: same price point, same proposition, four cans in the pack. When I first started at NON, Aaron and I went ’round in circles and eventually basically coined the phrase “wine alternative.” It’s not wine; it’s an alternative to wine. Now you see that phrase everywhere. So, we’re starting to get the consumer to understand, but I would love for us to coin a phrase that hits consumers and they go, “I drink this in a wine glass. It won’t taste like wine, but it’s for the occasion where wine is drunk.” But I guess that’s not really a punchy marketing phrase.

I have the sense that, at one point, “wine alternative” was more present in your marketing materials. I see it on your social channels, but was it ever on the label?

Trotman: Yes, it’s on the front of the Australian label. On the American label, it’s on the back, because there are some Food and Drug Administration regulations and licenses and stuff. But I think that alternative milks have done an okay job of this. In Australia, they just changed the I in milk to Y, so it’s mylks. And we played around with that idea. Like, maybe we’ll just call them wynes.

Ravalia: Another thing that I was going to say... I won’t name the brand, but there’s a brand that came out that wasn’t distilling anything. For all intents and purposes, it was a cordial that you drink with water in it, but on the label, it said “nonalc spirit.” At Seedlip, there was a bit of an uproar, but… If that brand had put something like “complex adult cordials without sugar,” it’s not glamorous. When you’re talking about adult drinks, there has to be an air of glamor to it, especially if you’re charging $30 a bottle. I think what Seedlip did was so revolutionary, and then if a cordial comes along and, sure, doesn’t have any sugar in it, but it has all these other sweeteners and there’s less craft behind it... My career in nonalc has been supporting craft and there is nothing in the world as crafted as NON. So how do we articulate that?

Can you explain what you mean when you say that NON is so highly crafted?

Ravalia: I don’t know anyone else in the world who spent 18 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars building a facility for one product, which is NON. So that’s the first part of it. The second part is, some of the ingredients on these other wine alternatives are crazy. Is it an extract? Is it real paste? You just don’t know. And in none of the marketing can you see any of the processes, whereas, for us, it’s really easy to see our chefs cooking pears, for example. And that comes with real barriers: If the pears aren’t ripe, you have to wait until they’re ripe, and we do it.

Trotman: If you think about it, $30 is actually quite cheap. If you go to a restaurant and there are four chefs who have touched your main course, that could be $40, right? That’s what we’re doing, but in the drinks space. Our dishes come out in liquid form in glass bottles. And it’s served in a wine glass because if you add ice to it, it’ll start to dilute and the balance is lost, et cetera, et cetera. Using extracts, on the other hand is like using essential oils and flavorings in cosmetics: Someone’s just putting drips of things together. And that’s why, if you have anything with extracts, the label might say it’s got all this stuff in it, but you can only really taste two flavors. It’s just like, put it in the drum, top it up with some water…

Let’s get back to the language conversation.

Trotman: I would be interested to understand how way the brain works around... If you had “alt wine,” alternative wine, does that change what you see first? Because with “wine alternative,” the expectation is that it tastes like a wine, but with “alternative wine,” you’re already expecting alternative first. How do people process words? It might be something really simple like that, that it’s around the wrong way. Maybe that’s it, Rish.

In the case of Seedlip, it’s distilled like a spirit, which is why you felt it was appropriate to call it a spirit. In the case of NON, it’s less a wine alternative, since it’s not made like wine, than it is a prepared dish in liquid form, like you said at the top of the conversation: a drink made by chefs. The same logic doesn’t really apply, I guess, because you’re using “wine alternative” to speak to how it should be drunk rather than how it’s made. Am I right? Or perhaps it has to do with using verjus?

Ravalia: Yes, and if you tried verjus on its own and then a white wine on its own, you might start to see the comparisons. But verjus on its own isn’t enough. In order to get a truly balanced beverage, we need to add salt, a fruit element, and a tannin element to it. The verjus is the acidity element. But if you ask a consumer what verjus is, they don’t have a clue. So you have to say to them, “These are the same grapes that go into make your Sémillon or your Chardonnay, but rather than fermenting them into alcoholic wine, we press the grapes [when they’re unripe], so they’re really bright, tart and acidic.”

If, in my time covering alcohol-free beverages, I’ve introduced more Americans to verjus, then my job is done. I’ve been trying!

Trotman: Julia, the Verjus Queen.

Ha! So, you’re sticking with “wine alternative” for now, it seems.

Ravalia: The landscape’s changing so quickly. I get the feeling that we’ll be leaning into that less. We’re going to be talking more about our processes and the ingredients and trying less to connect it to the word “wine.”

By the way, that Eleven Madison Park dinner showed me how beautifully these products can pair with food. NON 2, which contains caramelized pears, verjus, black tea, kombu, cardamom, and cloves, among other ingredients, was served with warm silken tofu and collard greens. An experience!