Exciting news! Elton John has launched his own alcohol-free wine. Granted, to many of us it seemed scarcely believable that Sir Elton hadn’t previously done so: he’d already been beaten to it by model Cara Delevingne and her sisters (Della Vite Zero), pop star Katy Perry (De Soi aperitif range), racing driver Lewis Hamilton (Almave non-alcoholic agave spirit) and, obviously, Kylie Minogue (Kylie 0% wine). But now Elton’s “Zero Blanc de Blancs”, a blend of Chardonnay grapes, green tea and, er, CO₂, has arrived just in time for Dry January.
I’m willing to accept one trade publication’s appreciation of its “enticing fruity-floral scents and flavours of ripe pear and white-fleshed peach”. What does baffle me is simply why this pap gets such lavish attention in the wine world.
The rise of low-and-no alcohol (NoLo) wine and other drinks was one of the biggest trade stories of last year. The sector’s sales reportedly doubled to £362 million between 2020 and 2023, and market analysts IWSR predict that could triple by 2028. That is the backdrop to each breathlessly reported new NoLo brand. Accordingly, after an expanded presence at the 2025 Wine Paris fair, this year’s will next month give NoLo drinks their own whole section, the curiously named “Be No” (“No alcohol. New perspectives.” Maybe it sounds cooler to French ears.)
The commercial performance of kombucha and the rest is relentless, we’re told – but in 2023, amounted to only around 2.5% of the value of UK wines sales (£14.5 billion), and less than 1% of total UK alcohol sales (£40 bn). It’s tiny compared to the regular soft drinks market too: Coca-Cola’s global sales in 2023 were $45.8 bn (£34.1 bn). Commercially, NoLo is relatively insignificant and likely to stay that way.
I realise that wine shops sell other things as well as wine – but I don’t recall seeing such excitable coverage of new brands of beer or peanuts. And I also get that most of the trade press covers drinks other than wine. But those publications don’t imply that new spirits brands or, say, the marketing strategies of major brewers, represent an existential threat to the wine industry. That, however, is the underlying subtext of much of the coverage of NoLo.
The reason for this implicit juxtaposition – rising NoLo, stricken wine – isn’t hard to find. The global wine industry has been in state of near panic over the past two years – especially in the US, where wine sales were down around 5% in 2024 and flat or slightly down last year. In the UK, sales rose a little last year though in a very price-squeezed market. In France, meanwhile, domestic sales are in worse shape, with supermarket wine sales down around seven per cent last year and those of red wine plunging by 7.5%.
The reasons for these drops have been much debated, from younger drinkers’ changing tastes to the rise of the new weight-loss drugs. But the cause of falling wine sales that is most glaring this month, Dry January, is rising teetotalism. And yes, that capitalisation is deliberate, because the phrase is trademarked by its inventors, lobby group Alcohol Change. This is a campaign against the booze industry, and one backed by its commercial competitors. Dry January’s commercial partners include Lucky Saint alcohol-free beer, Counter Culture kombucha, DASH flavoured sparkling water and Aquapax mineral water (let’s get this party started!)
This isn’t the place to unpick the rise of neo-prohibitionism, a phenomenon brilliantly exposed in a series of reports by journalist Felicity Carter. Suffice to say that its latest twist shows the wine industry, again, what we’re up against. President Trump has just taken the sensible course of action, amazingly, by rejecting specific alcohol limits in the newly revised official Dietary Guidelines for Americans. But at the same time, a Congressional committee has revealed the lengths that a Biden-commissioned report went to in trying to stigmatise drinking. The committee found that that the panel behind the report, intended to influence the new guidelines, was composed entirely of scientists affiliated with anti-alcohol groups, selected by a longtime anti-alcohol activist. Its apocalyptic conclusions – as a regular wine drinker, you’re virtually already dead – thus came as no surprise.
NoLo drinks backed by celebs aren’t just tedious. Even if it isn’t their intention or commercial purpose, they’re functionally part of an international neo-prohibitionist campaign against wine.
But beyond the political logic, NoLo is simply nothing to do with wine. Worse, it’s actually the antithesis of so much that many wine lovers care about. NoLo drinks are all anonymous products with no link to any particular place or culture. They’re the products of complex industrial processes far removed from artisanal wine, for example its care for the land, for fruit quality and natural yeasts. Counter Culture, for example, say their kombucha is made at a Bristol brewery. But who cares? It might as well be made in Bognor or Bochum and would make no difference to the product. This is something that Coca-Cola grasped – indeed capitalised upon – a long time ago.
And that’s before we get to the ways that wine is de-alcoholised for some NoLo wines. If you run wine though a reverse osmosis machine, or spinning cones, or vacuum boiling, you completely change its molecular composition. It’s no wonder the results taste as awful as they do.
If you want to drink sparkling tea or cherry-flavoured fizzy water instead of wine, fill your boots. And I know there are some people who can’t drink alcohol for medical reasons: if it was me, I’d rather literally go dry, or maybe have a Coke – but anyway, they have my sympathy. But these concoctions are of no more interest to me than a new flavour of Fanta. And they’re very distant from wine – thank goodness.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash