Lyre's Spirit Co, Melati Drinks, Roots Divino, Wilfred's Aperitif Set (2 × 700 mL + 2 × 500 mL)

Chris Wilfred started Wilfred's because the alcohol-free options he could find were sweet and not much else. He wanted the drink at the front of an evening — the one poured over ice and lengthened with tonic — to be worth pouring on its own terms.

The botanicals are close to home. Rosemary came from his mother's garden and went into the first test batches; it has stayed the defining note. Bitter orange came from his father's marmalade. Rhubarb and clove fill in behind them.

The result is British rather than Italian in character, and built for one job: a bittersweet spritz, one part aperitif to two parts tonic, over plenty of ice.

Lorin Winata was working in venture capital in Singapore, in a job built around client dinners and evening events, and kept finding that the non-alcoholic end of a drinks list came down to water or something very sweet.

What she did about it started at her family's ancestral farmland in Jatiluwih, in Bali, where tonic recipes had been kept on palm leaves. She spent roughly two years on the formulation with a food scientist and an Ayurvedic specialist, working down from a shortlist of more than seventy ingredients traditionally used in Asian tonics to the ones that ended up in the bottle.

Melati is the Indonesian name for white jasmine. The blends are cold-extracted botanical by botanical over several weeks rather than boiled together, then hand-blended in Singapore in small batches.

Mark Livings and Carl Hartmann founded Lyre's in Australia in 2019, setting out to build a range that echoed the classic spirits rather than inventing new flavors.

The name is the method. The lyrebird imitates whatever it hears — other birds, a camera shutter, a chainsaw — and the range is built the same way, each bottle answering a spirit a bartender already knows how to use. That is why the labels say Gin Alternative and Dark Rum Alternative rather than inventing a word for what is in them.

The bottles carry the Social Animals, a cast of characters drawn one to a liquid. The range now runs from the spirits through a sparkling Classico to canned cocktails, and the company sells in more than sixty countries.

Manos and Nikolas Smyrlakis were building careers elsewhere when Greece's crisis sent their generation abroad. They went the other way — home, and into the family trade. Their relatives own Callicounis Distilleries in Kalamata, working since 1850 and the oldest still running in the country, and in 2013 the brothers started Roots there, reviving old Greek liqueur recipes with ingredients gathered from around the country.

Roots Divino came out of that. The name is the argument twice over: back to their roots, and di vino — of wine. Vermouth is a wine-based drink, and almost every alcohol-free version on the market is built on water and flavoring instead. Roots Divino starts from Greek wine, which is what lets it behave like vermouth in a glass rather than approximate one.

Production moved to Lesbos in 2019 as demand grew. The reference point for the drink itself is older than vermouth: the wormwood wine described by Hippocrates, from the neighboring island of Kos.