Before I get started in the lab developing a drink, I put pen to paper and think of the concept. Inspiration for this part comes from many places - an incredible botanical ingredient, and experience, and feedback from you, our community!
Then it's time to choose our base wine and the style of wine to create. For most of our wines, we use a premium, de-alcoholised Australian wine as the base. We work with our winemaking partners to produce a premium alcoholic wine (including all of the regular steps, from picking grapes, to fermenting them).
Then we use the spinning cone method to gently remove the alcohol, a method that gently distils off the alcohol, without using heat (so that most of those complex flavour notes stay in tact). You can see less than a quarter the spinning cone in the header image above - it's a pretty big piece of equipment!
This method also doesn't dilute the wine with water as it removes the alcohol, and doesn't introduce any chemicals or use any harsh additives. We're able to remove the alcohol from over 18,000L of wine in about an hour!
We remove almost all of the alcohol using this method (we get it to less than 0.02%ABV - less alcohol than in a ripe banana!!).
At this stage, the wine does taste pretty average if we're totally honest. It lacks any of the "mouthfeel" you'd expect from a wine, and is pretty acidic. It has a little bit of complexity, and a hint of the varietal characteristics of the original wine.
Now, most non-alc. winemakers add either sugar or grape juice concentrate to the base wine. This helps to give some "weight" to the palate and improve the mouthfeel, and also masks that vinegar-y acidity. This is the traditional approach to non-alc winemaking, and can often result in either vinegar-y, or sickly sweet non-alc. wines, and they're often lacking complexity and depth.
Luckily for you, I've worked hard to innovate in this space to turn this not-so-delicious wine base into something delicious. It's this next part where the real magic happens, when we get blending with beautiful botanicals.