Athletic Brewing, Free Spirits, Kolonne Null, Little Saints, NON Drinks, Seedlip Drinks Fall Box (2 × 750 mL + 1 × 700 mL + 1 × 355 mL + 1 × 250 mL + 1 × 235 mL)

Kolonne Null started in Berlin in 2018, and the shape of the company is the interesting part. It does not own vineyards. It buys finished wine from family growers across Europe — Bordeaux, Provence, La Mancha, the Rheingau — and works on it in a laboratory of its own in the city.

That arrangement means the conversation with a grower starts before the harvest rather than after it. The house talks through what it wants from a parcel while the fruit is still on the vine, which is a different relationship from buying a tank and seeing what turns up. Its lab works alongside partner winemakers and research institutions, and the range has widened steadily as that work has gone on.

The next step is land. Kolonne Null has said it intends to build its own production site and plant a vineyard in the Havelland, west of Berlin, with visiting winemakers working alongside its own. For a company that has spent seven years working on other people's wine, that would be the first it makes from the beginning.

Seedlip started in 2014 in Ben Branson’s cottage in the British countryside, with a small copper still, herbs from his own garden, and a book. The book was The Art of Distillation, published in 1651, which describes distilled remedies made without any alcohol in them at all — and that turned out to be the idea nobody had picked up in three and a half centuries.

What came of it takes six weeks a batch. Every ingredient is macerated and copper-pot distilled on its own before anything is blended, which is slower than making one distillate from a basket of botanicals and is the reason Garden 108 tastes of peas rather than of green. Then blending, filtration, and bottling in England.

There are four, and they go in different directions rather than being four shades of one idea. Garden 108 is peas and hay with rosemary, thyme and spearmint. Grove 42 is three kinds of orange over lemongrass and ginger, with a sansho peppercorn prickle. Spice 94 is Jamaican allspice and cardamom over oak and cascarilla, and finishes long and bitter. Notas de Agave is prickly pear, lime and agave with vanilla and damiana flower.

No sugar and no sweetener in any of them, which is the harder way to make something taste of anything.

NON is Aaron Trotman and William Wade. Trotman had spent time in fine-dining kitchens across Europe and came away thinking the problem was not that non-alcoholic wine tasted bad but that it was the wrong idea. Wade had cooked at noma. Between them they set out to build the experience of a wine glass out of ingredients rather than out of wine.

Everything starts from verjus — the juice of unripe Semillon grapes from the Barossa Valley, which brings acidity without fermentation. From there each drink is a recipe: raspberries cold-steeped for two days, chamomile for tannin and a creamy finish, Murray River salt for salinity. Nothing is fermented and nothing is removed.

The numbering is deliberate. Each is an attempt at a different wine occasion rather than a copy of a grape, and the labels list the ingredients the way a fine-dining menu would.

Athletic Brewing began in 2017 with a problem Bill Shufelt could not solve at a bar. He had stopped drinking in 2013, and what he was handed instead was thin and apologetic. He left a career at a hedge fund, sought out John Walker, a head brewer working in Santa Fe, and the two of them set out to make beer worth ordering that happened to have no alcohol in it.

What they arrived at is what still separates the brewery from most of the shelf. The usual route is to brew at full strength and take the alcohol back out afterward, by heat or by membrane, which costs the beer some of its aroma on the way. Athletic ferments each batch in full and removes nothing, holding the alcohol down by controlling the brew itself, temperature above all. Nothing is stripped at the end and nothing is added to make up for what left.

They built in Stratford, Connecticut, the first brewery in the country given over entirely to non-alcoholic beer, and later a second in San Diego. Two percent of sales goes back to restoring local trails. The range runs from the year-round bottles a shopper already knows by name, Run Wild and Upside Dawn and Athletic Lite, through a stream of limited releases that arrive, sell, and are gone.

Milan Martin spent over a decade at Ogilvy & Mather in London and New York, then ran Grey's San Francisco office, before starting The Free Spirits Company in Marin County. The question he says he started from was whether alcohol needed to be the star of a cocktail at all.

The method has a name — distillate reconstruction. Real materials go in first: American white oak, European juniper, Mexican blue agave. Their essence is distilled off and then the nose, the flavor and the mouthfeel are rebuilt around it, which is why the bottles carry weight in a stirred drink rather than thinning out.

The company is small and still run from Mill Valley.

Little Saints makes two things: three non-alcoholic spirits in 750 mL bottles and 100 mL flasks, and a range of canned cocktails. Both carry extracts of Lion’s Mane, Reishi or Damiana, which is what the brand is known for — and how those extracts get into the bottle is the more interesting part.

Mushrooms are not ground and stirred in, which is the usual approach and the reason mushroom drinks tend to taste like mushrooms. Little Saints use ultrasound to draw the beta-glucans out of the Lion’s Mane and Reishi, and add that extract instead. It carries no flavor of its own. The Lion’s Mane is grown in California.

The spirits are built on oil-based extracts rather than flavored water, which is why they have some weight in the glass and hold up over ice instead of thinning out. Heat comes from capsicum, drawn from peppers, standing in for the bite alcohol would otherwise give. St. Ember’s sweetness is not added at all — it comes from palo santo, which belongs to the same family as fennel and mint. That palo santo is sustainably sourced, and one percent of proceeds goes to reforestation in Peru.