BonBon Zero, Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company, Kolonne Null, Pierre Chavin, So Jennie Paris, Sutter Home FRE Holiday Sampler (6 × 750 mL)

BONBON is a Korean drinks brand, born in Seoul, and the gap between where it is thought up and where it is made is the design rather than an accident of it. The idea, the direction and the look are Korean. The making goes to whoever does it best, wherever they are, which is how one brand carries wine, soju and makgeolli without any of it coming from one place.

The producers it names are the point. Quinta do Ermizio farms by hand in Portugal's Vinho Verde, Azul y Garanza works the wild country of Navarra, and Carl Jung has been making wine without alcohol in the Rheingau since 1907. BONBON brings the vision and leaves the making to people who were already good at it.

Zero is the alcohol-free line, and it follows that pattern exactly: drawn up in Seoul, produced in Germany, from wine vinified in full before the alcohol is taken back out of it. Five bottles — a still Riesling, Merlot and Rosé, and a Blanc de Blancs and Sparkling Rosé with bubbles.

The labels are commissioned the same way as the wine. Jose Miguel Mendez, Hattie Stewart and Gianluca Cannizzo each had a point of view long before BONBON called, and the bottle is treated as a canvas rather than as packaging. It is the first thing anyone notices on a shelf.

In 2010, Jacob Kocemba was working the floor of a Michelin-starred kitchen in Copenhagen. The chef changed a dessert at short notice, and with more than seventeen hundred wines in the cellar behind him there was nothing on the list that worked with it. What he poured instead was a tea he had blended himself. Guests began asking for it by name.

Hundreds of trials later he had the basis for a range. In 2017 he partnered with Bo Sten Hansen and they sold their first bottle in Copenhagen that May. It is poured today in Michelin-starred restaurants around the world. When Fortnum & Mason first stocked the teas in London, the window read "Tea but not as you know it."

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.

In 2010, Jennie Kergoat-Ruelland was planning a royal wedding in Abu Dhabi. The event was as lavish as any she had run, and when the moment came to raise a glass the guests who did not drink were toasting with fruit juice. She set out to make something that belonged on the same table.

So Jennie Paris is made in France from selected grape musts, lightly carbonated and never fermented — 0.0% alcohol, and Halal certified. The butterfly on the bottle is screen-printed in 21-carat gold, which is the part people remember. It is poured at the Four Seasons George V, at Harrods, and in Qatar Airways First and Business class.

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.

FRE has been making alcohol-removed wine in St. Helena, California since 1992, which makes it older than the category it belongs to. It started at Sutter Home’s winery in the Napa Valley and it has been the bottle most Americans encounter first ever since — on a supermarket shelf, at a baby shower, at the table of somebody who is not drinking tonight.

The grapes come from across California, from the cool coastal sites of Monterey County up into Napa, and the wine is made in full first, by ordinary methods. Then it goes into a spinning cone column: rotating cones spread it into a thin film, nitrogen carries the aromatics off at low temperature so they are not cooked, and a second pass at higher heat takes the alcohol. The aromas go back in, and unfermented juice from the same variety replaces what left.

That last step is why FRE tastes the way it does — rounder and fruitier than a bottle that has simply had its alcohol stripped, and sweeter than most of what sits beside it. The house calls it the sophisticated alternative on every label. What it really is, is the bottle that got there first and stayed.