Ariel Vineyards, BonBon Zero, Elivo, Kolonne Null, Le Petit Beret, Lussory Premium, Pierre Chavin, Prima Pave, Princess Alternativa White Wine Deluxe Edition (12 × 750 mL)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ARIEL began because a hotel chain asked. Hyatt noticed its alcohol sales falling and went to J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines, who had been making their wines since 1974, and asked whether a wine without the alcohol was possible. The answer arrived in 1985, and it went on to win a Gold Medal against wines with alcohol at the Los Angeles Commercial Wine & Spirits competition. Forty years on, that is still a rare thing.

The method is J. Lohr’s own and they hold the patent on it: reverse osmosis, which separates the alcohol out under pressure rather than with heat, so the aromatics are never cooked off. The grapes come from their sustainably farmed estate vineyards in Monterey County’s Arroyo Seco and in Paso Robles, and the wine is fermented and barrel-aged in full before any of that begins. The oak happens first, which is why the Cabernet has grip and the Chardonnay has a whisper of toast.

The name is Shakespeare’s — Ariel, the ethereal spirit of The Tempest — and in 2024 the bottles were redrawn around it, with botanical illustrations, lighter glass and a screwcap. Two wines: a Chardonnay and a Cabernet Sauvignon.

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.

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.