If it looks like a duck...

What is Bailey’s? Or Aperol? Or Pimms?

What legal category do they fit into?

How many of the people who enjoy them know, or care?

How many Guinness drinkers ever think of the black liquid as ‘stout’.

How many of its many fans are aware - or interested - that Prosecco is produced in a different way to Cava and Champagne?

How many people who buy bourbon-barrel-aged Zinfandel, fruit-flavoured Stella Rosa, or fruit-flavoured and fortified XXL, stop to consider whether they are ‘wine’?

The men and women who are drinking any of these don’t need to think about whether Bailey’s is a ‘cream liqueur’ or that Aperol is a ‘bitters’. They are happy to take them for what they are.

All of this matters when it comes to alcohol-free. There’s a growing chorus of objections to wine that has been dealcoholised, or to grape juice fermented with yeast that doesn’t produce alcohol, being called ‘wine’.

Despite being involved in making a 0.0, I actually share this view, but recent EU legislation that allows the term clearly disagrees.

In any case, it all feels rather like bald men arguing over a comb.

Same bottles

Whatever it is legally called, a non-alcoholic fermented beverage produced from grapes - you can see how tricky this is all going to be linguistically - is almost certainly going to be sold in a ‘Bordeaux’ ‘Burgundy’ or ‘Riesling’ bottle. Just like lots of other liquids that are packaged in glass.

If it is made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes, for example, those words will appear on the label. And if it is produced by the owner of a popular wine brand such as Torres or Mionetto, so will that name.

In other words, it will look like wine. But so does many an Italian olive oil

Maybe, in a more tightly-controlled world, some authority might have insisted on a different form of packaging for AF ‘wine’, and banned the use of grape names or wine brands. But, since this hasn’t happened with AF beers or spirits, it is hard to imagine why wine would have suffered this discrimination.

Like coffee

Ultimately, what matters is that consumers aren’t confused and misled, but that is just as true of decaffeinated coffee, fat-free yoghurt and sugar-free drinks. In the case of AF, the words Alcohol-Free and/or 0.0% should be unmissable. If that's what you want, that's what you are going to get.

How these products are described and talked about by the people who buy and drink them is another matter.

Are bottles of Heineken 0.0 casually referred to as ‘beer’?

Do hosts say ‘here’s your gin-and-tonic’ when handing a guest a cocktail made with Tanqueray 0.0?

More than likely - just as glasses of Cava and Crémant are casually described in private homes as ‘Champagne’. And lumpfish roe as caviar.

Zero-alcohol and low alcohol ‘wine’ is still a small category, but it’s already worth $2.5bn; it’s growing and it's being produced by an ever-larger number of traditional wine businesses.

Whether other, more conservative, wineries like it or not, and however they're described, the 0.0s are setting up home in the next street.

Please check out my substack