beClink.com Rosé Tasting Party Set (12 × 750 mL)

Princess began in 2012 in Lavis, a town in the Trentino valley north of Verona, when Michele Tait wrote up a study on lowering the alcohol in the wines then on the market. He came to the question after years in the cellar and the vineyard rather than from outside the trade, and what he was answering was a demand the shelf was not meeting.

The first bottles still carried a little alcohol, enough to sit under the limit that lets a drink be called analcolica in Italy. The line that carries the name arrived the year after, and it is made the longer way round: the wine is vinified in full and the alcohol drawn out afterwards, without chemical treatment. Princess is direct about what that leaves, and about what it is not, which is grape juice or must.

The name is the Italian word for alternative, and it was chosen to say plainly what the range was for. It runs through still whites, rosés and reds, a set of sparkling Bollicine from dry through extra dry to sweet, and an aperitivo alongside them. All of it is made in Lavis.

Lussory is made in Spain, and the back label carries Dismark Products of Santiago de Compostela — the far northwest, where the Atlantic weather comes in. The fruit is from somewhere else entirely. It comes off La Mancha, the wide, high plateau south of Madrid, and both ranges are built from it: Airen and Tempranillo, Merlot and Chardonnay, all grown a long way from the corner of Spain the brand comes from.

The wine is made conventionally and matured for twelve months before anything is removed. The alcohol then comes off by vacuum distillation, under reduced pressure and at temperatures low enough that the aromatics are not driven off with it. Taking it out at the end rather than never letting it in is what leaves the reds their grip and the whites their fruit.

Two ranges sit under the name. The Premium bottles run through Merlot, Tempranillo, Airen and Chardonnay to a Rosé, a sparkling Brut, and the 24K Gold. The Organic range is the smaller of the two: a Merlot, a Chardonnay and a Brut of its own.

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.

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.

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.

Le Petit Béret works among the vineyards of the Hérault, in the Languedoc. What it makes is not dealcoholized wine, and that distinction is the whole of the idea.

The house holds a patent on a method in which no alcohol is produced at all. Instead of fermenting and then stripping, the drink is built from infusions and natural extraction, worked out with oenologists and extraction specialists. It takes fewer steps than dealcoholization and less energy, and nothing has to be undone at the end.

The range runs wider than wine. White, red and rosé profiles, sparkling bottles, spirits and beers — all of them arrived at the same way.