Fooling the Taste Buds : No-Alcohol Wine Is in the Wings

Richard Carey poured some Gewurztraminer into a wine glass, swirled it and bent over to sample the spicy aroma before taking some into his mouth to assess the taste of a drink that he thinks could become a major new kind of “adult” beverage: wine without alcohol.

Carey, a researcher at Cal State Fresno’s Viticulture and Enology Research Center here, has developed a means of reconstituting the 1% of wine that is not water or alcohol in such a way as to “fool the taste buds” into thinking they have experienced alcohol that is not there.

Extracting the alcohol changes the character of the wine, Carey explained in an interview, but “food chemists” can reconstitute the flavor elements to produce a drink that is, he said, “non-cloying, refreshing, pleasant and complements food.” De-alcoholized “wine” now on the market, such as Seagram’s St. Regis, suffers from what he called “flavor problems” that so far have limited its appeal.

“This isn’t juice and it isn’t wine,” Carey said of the alcohol-free Gewurztraminer in his hand. “It’s a different class of beverage--a whole new adult-beverage class--that will go with food. I just haven’t figured out what to call it.” He said he expects to produce red and rose wine as well as whites.

California’s wine-grape growers and the Fresno campus’ California Agricultural Technology Institute support Carey’s research at the center in hopes of finding ways to increase grape consumption. Thus, the de-alcoholized wines being produced here on an experimental basis could enlarge what is becoming a powerful trend toward consumption of lighter, lower-calorie alcoholic beverages.

The trend shows up most dramatically in wine coolers--already a global phenomenon, even though the first of them, California Cooler, appeared in a very limited way only in late 1981 but picked up momentum quickly over the next year.

By 1983, however, 3.5 million cases with a retail value of $75 million were sold, most of it California Cooler. Sales increased in 1984--the first year that the citrus-flavored, carbonated wine drink was widely available--to 15.3 million cases worth $300 million. Last year, sales topped 40.8 million cases, valued at $800 million.

That amounts to about a billion bottles of the relatively low-alcohol beverage--about four bottles per person in the United States, observed Eileen Fredrikson, partner in the San Francisco wine consulting firm of Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates.

“We’re looking at a market that continues to be running far ahead of last year,” Fredrikson said. Through April, more than 120 brands of coolers were on the market, selling at a pace 78% ahead of the same period in 1985 and all containing 5% to 6% alcohol, about half that of table wines and about the same as most beers.

But coolers and de-alcoholized “wine” are not the only indications of a trend that some have called “the new temperance.” Some others:

- San Jose-based Mirassou Winery introduced Pastel this spring as a low-alcohol White Zinfandel blended (but not diluted, the company insists) with the unfermented but naturally tart juice of French Colombard wine grapes. Another San Jose winery, J. Lohr, is producing another low-alcohol wine that it calls Ariel.

- Seagram is offering what it describes as a dry wine cooler, Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler, which it hopes will appeal to the taste of “traditional wine drinkers who are looking for a cooler of quality with a sophisticated wine taste.”

- The first spirit-based coolers were introduced in Canada last August by Seagram, which sold 25,000 cases of rye-whiskey cooler, then launched two vodka coolers and a tropical rum cooler--all similar in alcohol content to the wine-based coolers.

- Pommay, imported from Canada and containing 4% alcohol, is the first cooler to be made from fermented fresh apple juice that is clarified, then lightly carbonated.

- Warteck beer from Switzerland is brewed from the start without producing alcohol.

- Meier’s Sparkling Chablis is described as an alcohol-free beverage made from grape juices with no sugar added.

The common thread among these beverages is their low level of alcohol, ranging from virtually zero to 5% to 6.5%.

“Most cooler producers have opted for sweet and carbonated blends of white wine and citrus fruit flavors,” according to Impact International, a New York-based publication that tracks global trends in beverage consumption. “These brands have proven doubly appealing to youthful, health-conscious consumers. Socially, they have been accepted as moderate, even healthy indulgence, while practically they offer their essentially active consumer profile a compromise against increasingly stringent drunk-driving laws.

“The young professional middle class, with a significant female bias, provided the main contribution to the additional 30 million cases sold in the United States last year, giving U.S. producers a welcome 202% increase in sales,” Impact International reported.

Global Phenomenon

But the wine cooler phenomenon has already become global--and in part for the same reasons, consultant Fredrikson said. “People are drinking ‘less of better’ all around the world, basically,” she said. “There’s a trend toward natural things and life styles that are active, and in Europe non-alcoholic beers have been around for years.”

Italian and French producers have entered the U.S. market and are pitching their beverages toward a market distinctly upscale from that of the sweet and fizzy original wine coolers. French-made Quenchette, for example, comes in such flavors as Kir (named for the Dijonais cocktail in which black currant syrup brings a blush to white Burgundy wine) and Mimosa (sparkling wine and orange juice).

Despite the proliferation of coolers, just 10 brands account for 92% of sales, Fredrikson said. “There’s lots of fragmentation in small regional markets, where local brands are strong,” she said, “but in a very short period of time this has become a market for large players with financial clout and marketing moxie.

“With the kind of players we have now and the kind of advertising they are doing and the kind of life style concerns around, consumption could double again this year.”

Large Ad Budgets

According to Wine Investor, a trade newsletter published in Beverly Hills, advertising budgets for coolers have quickly become very large by wine industry standards. Gallo, which introduced its Bartles & Jaymes brand in May, 1985, and may already have overhauled California Cooler, has budgeted $35 million this year. Other ad budgets include Seagram, $31 million; California Cooler (owned by Brown-Forman Corp.), $27 million; Anheuser-Busch, $18 million.

That $111-million total, according to editor Ursula Ziegler, exceeds the total advertising expenditures for all wine in the United States through 1978.

“Light wines fell flat,” as did their taste, Ziegler said. But the light wines also were not promoted much by the wineries that produced them, she added, while consumers will be hard pressed to overlook the heavily advertised coolers.

And the number of potential consumers who have yet to taste the new beverages remains huge.

“There is a large market out there for wine-like beverages,” agreed Carey of Fresno State’s Viticulture and Enology Research Center. It includes wine drinkers who want to cut down on alcohol and/or calories--six ounces of alcohol-free Gewurztraminer contain about 40 calories, compared to 110 for a like quantity of table wine, he said, as well as those with religious or other personal reasons for abstaining from alcohol.

“We are replicating the (taste) sensation of alcohol,” he said, but eliminating its intoxicating effects. The experimental Gewurztraminer contains less than 0.5% alcohol--the potency of cultured buttermilk, he said, adding: “It’s physically impossible to drink enough to have an alcoholic effect; you’d have to consume 48 bottles in an hour.”

All this talk of new markets is good news to wine-grape growers, who had been contending with overproduction and slumping prices until the cooler phenomenon began stirring demand, starting last year and continuing even more strongly this year.

Said Robert Hartzell, president of the California Assn. of Winegrape Growers:

“I truly believe the stars are finally lining up on our side.”

Nor is the end in sight, according to Fredrikson: “I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of the ways one can make a refreshing, low-alcohol drink.”