Kolonne Null, Pierre Chavin French Red Sampler (4 × 750 mL)

Maison Chavin works out of Béziers, in the Languedoc, and makes alcohol-free wine at a scale almost nobody else does — nine separate ranges rather than one, sold in more than sixty countries.

The division that matters to anyone buying runs underneath the names. Some ranges are made as wine and have the alcohol taken back out at the end. Others are never fermented at all, built instead from grape juice, infusions of oak and grape seed, and long maceration, so there is no alcohol to remove. Pierre Zéro, the flagship and the oldest of them, is the first kind. ÔPIA and Le Petit Étoilé are the second.

That split is also where the sulfites fall. Le Petit Étoilé is made without preservatives or sulfites and was built for French bistros; the Pierre Zéro bottles declare sulfites on the label. Two answers to two different questions, from one house.

The grapes are the French standards — Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot — and the bottles come full-size and in smaller formats for one.

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.