These are challenging times for the wine industry: health and well-being have become priorities for a critical mass of consumers, while among young people attitudes to alcohol appear to be changing fundamentally. In this context, the expansion of the alcohol-free wine category is almost inevitable.
One company in a position to profit from this is ConeTech.
The technology
Part of the Advanced Beverage Technologies group, California-based ConeTech has been at the forefront of wine de-alcoholisation technology for almost three decades. The company was founded in 1988 by Tony Dann, a winery owner frustrated by a lack of consistency in his product. Identifying alcohol as the primary cause, he turned for a solution to the spinning cone column (SCC), a technology initially used to separate heavy water for use in the nuclear industry but later developed for use in food and drinks by Flavourtech in Australia.
Today ConeTech is the largest owner and user of SCCs in the wine industry. With bases in the US, Chile, South Africa and Spain, its columns are used by hundreds of major wineries around the world. Until very recently its main application was the fine-tuning of alcohol levels and the development of lifestyle wines (8-12% ABV), but the biggest growth segment for ConeTech is alcohol-free (0-0.5% ABV).
Debbie Novograd, the company’s deputy CEO, explains that in ConeTech’s European base in Spain, there has been a surge in demand for no-alcohol wines in the decade since Torres launched its Natureo de-alcoholised Muscat, a wine made using SCC technology, in 2007. But now the trend is also beginning to develop in the US and beyond.
The technology is, in essence, low-temperature vacuum distillation: a portion of a given wine is processed through the SCC in two passes. A first pass, at about 30℃, separates the wine’s delicate volatile aroma and flavour compounds. A second at about 40℃ removes the alcohol. The de-alcoholised wine and the aroma/flavour fraction are then blended back with the original wine to the required alcohol level.
The vacuum allows users to operate at the high temperatures required to separate a wine’s components without causing heat damage to the product, which could adversely affect its flavour. Importantly, the SCC only exposes the wine to high temperatures for seconds, unlike reverse osmosis, which can expose a wine to high temperatures for several hours. ConeTech claims this gentler treatment retains 100% of the most volatile compounds in a wine, making an SCC de-alcoholised wine as faithful to the original product as possible.
Given that the consumer appetite is there, why aren’t producers lining up to adopt the technology? One reason is that de-alcoholisation of wine remains complicated. Dr Matthias Schmitt from Geisenheim University has spent the past decade evaluating pre- and post-fermentation technologies used to produce wines with less alcohol. He points out that there is always some “collateral damage” when processing alcohol-free wine, even when using the SCC. Depending on the wine being processed, this damage can include oxidation and microbial spoilage, because de-alcoholisation can reduce free SO2 content by up to 75%. ‘Cooked vegetable’ reduction can occur, caused by exposure of certain low-volatility sulphur compounds which would otherwise have been buffered by alcohol. Another risk is profound changes to a wine’s sensory profile.
Perhaps the most important potential change is the loss of body, of mouthfeel. Generally speaking this will necessitate later oenological interventions – depending on wine style, sweetening, or the addition of CO2 or tannins – to buffer that loss. Schmitt also sees the potential significant loss of aroma and flavour.
“It is important to understand to what degree alcohol reduction makes the wines different from the initial wine,” he explains. “The sensory effect of alcohol is very complex: sensations of bitterness and sweetness are reduced when the wines have reduced alcohol. The perceived acidity of the wines also rises, while fruitiness is reduced.”
Clearly there are a multitude of winemaking challenges to consider. This, Novograd explains, is why ConeTech’s strategic focus over the past five years has been to boost its winemaking credentials – the company now employs six full-time winemakers – and seek ways to optimise the quality of the wines processed through its de-alcoholisation system.
“We took a step back,” she says, “and said: there’s a lot of junk out there, a lot of products that are not very good, so how, as the experts at alcohol removal, do we best educate ourselves about how to produce a finished product – not only to service the industry to remove alcohol, but to really know best of anyone how to make a good-quality product that would go on the shelf?”
Part of the answer was identifying what was required to rebuild wine after de-alcoholisation, but the company says it found the real difference between a good and a bad alcohol-free wine is choosing the right wine in the first place.
“Our company has spent nearly ten years employing multiple winemakers and food scientists to research and understand the key characteristics of the most suitable wines for de-alcoholisation,” says Novograd. “It is true that when you lose the alcohol in a wine you lose structure and balance, but after all our experience, if you find the perfect wine to start with, the balance will also be almost perfect.”
Mobile technology
One step forward at ConeTech – which could encourage a significant upturn of new entrants into the alcohol-free category – is the development of its proprietary GoLo technology. This is a system developed with process engineering firm Logichem in South Africa to improve the efficiency and accessibility of the de-alcoholisation process.
The SCC’s size and infrastructure requirements dictate that it is not suitable for mobile use. Even the smallest units can exceed 4-5m in height and weigh more than 5 tonnes. In addition, the need for steam working pressures of 6-8 bar is beyond the capabilities of most common steam generators and pipes used in the beverage industry. The SCC units are also expensive. Though customers can hire the service, to buy the machinery will cost them $1m-1.5m for the smallest unit.
GoLo overcomes all these limitations while also increasing the technical efficiency of the process: conventional SCCs distill in two steps, which is not especially efficient. The GoLo system does it in one step. “In the past it was a small number of typically larger producers that had interest in this style of technology,” says Novograd. “What we have seen change most recently is that, with the expansion of low and no-alcohol wines, there are more players interested in having or using the technology. The affordability, the scale, has become more important, so it has become accessible to more people.”
Can the wine world expect a greater diversity and quality of alcohol-free wine in future? Will super-premium alcohol-free wine comparable to, say, Seedlip de-alcoholised spirit become available? According to Novograd, this is very much possible – and not far off. “We are absolutely convinced that there is the possibility to do that,” she says, “and the fact that it has not been done before is just because nobody has invested what needs to be invested.” As she notes: “If you use low-quality grapes you are going to have low-quality wine; if you use low-quality wine to produce de-alcoholised wine you’re going to have low-quality de-alcoholised wine. The moment you start using high-quality wine through these delicate processes, and you reserve those essences, and you actually have the Diageo kind of money to invest in the marketing – voilà.”
Will the category expand?
Most observers would agree that wine lags some way behind craft beer and Seedlip-style spirits in terms of the sophistication of its de-alcoholised products. Pressure is already being exerted on wine from other types of ‘wine occasion’ products. How will wine producers respond? For Novograd, there is considerably more work to be done in marketing than in production.
“The higher the quality of the wine you start with, the better the quality of the finished product,” she says, “but you cannot start with that high-quality of a wine if you’re selling it for €3 a bottle. So there has to be a premiumisation to this category to drive product quality. That’s part of the challenge happening at the moment. It’s not a matter of, ‘Can the category catch up?’. It’s just that there was no demand for it in the past. With focus, the category can catch up in six months if they choose to.”
She also thinks it will take a concerted effort from retailers to promote the category. “In the UK, you still go into a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s and you have to search the shelves [for alcohol-free wines]. Whereas I was in Sweden a couple of weeks ago and there it’s an area of promotion. There are designated shelves where you can search among 25 different products and start to identify some which will be higher quality.”
It’s easy to imagine that soon, the growing number of discerning, health-conscious consumers will want more from alcohol-free wine – more than a couple of anaemic ‘less-than’ options, or mere lip-service extensions of established brands. Wine producers that are willing to make the necessary investment and plant their flag in super-premium alcohol-free territory may find themselves richly repaid for their efforts.
