Elivo, Noughty Wine by Thomson & Scott, Pierre Chavin, Prima Pave, So Jennie Paris Rosé Selection (6 × 750 mL)

Noughty is Amanda Thomson’s brand, made under Thomson & Scott, a certified B Corporation. She grew up on a plant-based diet with no sugar in it, which is a useful thing to know about someone who went on to build a range around what is actually in the bottle.

The wines come from two places and are made two ways. The sparklings are Spanish: Chardonnay off sandy, calcareous vineyards in the south, and Tempranillo from La Mancha. Both are vinified conventionally in stainless steel, then dealcoholized by vacuum distillation with aroma recovery and lightly carbonated afterwards, which is why the bubble is fine rather than fizzy.

The still wines come from the Western Cape, off dry-land farmed vineyards where the vines are grown untrellised as bush vines on south-west facing slopes. Atlantic breezes and the cold Benguela current keep the fruit cool, and the soils are decomposed granite over clay. Those wines are fermented slowly, rested on lees, and then dealcoholized by gently spun cone under vacuum at low temperature — a different method from the Spanish bottles, chosen to hold body and color in a wine that has no bubble to carry it.

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.

Prima Pavé is Dejou and Marco Marano’s brand. Both are Certified Specialists of Wine who spent a decade building food and wine tourism businesses, working alongside vintners around the world. Dejou started looking for an alcohol-free sparkling while pregnant with their first child, wanted something with the complexity of a real wine, and found the shelf thin.

They took the question to a winemaker in Northern Italy and built a range around it. The fruit is sustainably farmed and comes from three regions: Friuli for the whites and the sparkling blends, Abruzzo for the Montepulciano that colors the rosés, and Puglia for the Susumaniello behind the red. The wines are made as wine first and dealcoholized afterwards.

No sugar or chemicals are added to make up the difference. The range runs from a bone-dry Blanc de Blancs through a creamy Grand Cuvée to a demi-sec rosé, with a still white and a chillable red alongside, and three of them come in single-pour bottles as well as full ones.

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.

Elivo belongs to Mercantia Desarrollos Alimentarios, a food-innovation lab in Silleda, in the green northwest corner of Galicia. Its founder, Ramón Bodenlle, made the first alcohol-free wine in Spain in 2008 and sold it under the name Raisin Dor; the range became Elivo Zero Zero as the category found its audience, and the winery has been refining the same question ever since — how much of a wine survives when the ethanol leaves.

Their answer is a method of their own. The wine is made conventionally first, then the alcohol is drawn off by evaporation at low temperature, with the aromatics captured through membranes and cryogenics and returned to the liquid. A second technique the house calls DEMADERA carries the character of barrel time across into the finished red. The Cardio Zero line goes further in the opposite direction, built from grapes and processes chosen to raise the phenolic content of what ends up in the glass.

A 2017 research project earned the house its Halal certification, and its bottles have travelled since — to the Gulf from 2016, then to Southeast Asia and China. For a Galician lab that started with one bottle and a question, that is a long way from Silleda.