That's wild about the aged de-alc wine! Too bad it's not here in the states, I'd love to try something that blew me away. Personally, I've (Isaac) never had a de-alcoholized red wine that I thought was even remotely good, and rarely one that resembled actual wine -- but I'm eager to change that!
I've had lots of positive experiences with whites and sparkling, though. It's easier to come up with a bar to set for those, because without needing to worry so much about phenolic content and tannins, whites and sparklings sit a little more in the fruit juice space in my mind, where a de-alc sparkling has to taste better than a Martinellis or sparkling soda to be worth considering (especially since a lot of the bad ones just kind of taste like sour water or off fruit juice).
My problem with most de-alcoholized reds is that they are way out of balance. Too sour, overly sweetened to compensate, no tannin structure to speak of. Notes of off fruit or spoiled Welch's grape juice. The best ones I've had more closely resemble wine aromatically, but they lack any inviting characteristics and are often still too sour. At least those ones can offer someone avoiding alcohol a more wine-like experience. But is it better than just having a tea or something? I'm not convinced 😬
We're about to do a pretty epic 19-bottle tasting of de-alc, focusing predominantly on reds, and all on the Premium to Ultra Premium in quality/price points - we want to put the best of the best to the test to figure precisely how far we've actually come thus far, which will give us all a better pov into what the immediate future might portend, vs. the lower shelf brands which reflects what can be done on the cheap and veer more toward past ways of getting the product made.
There's a lot of truly fascinating ideas being tried right now - two of the wines we'll be tasting do a second fermentation like a Champagne, *without the need to de-alc the wine again!* It's wild, and we'll be covering it. But never forget that "innovation" means things that haven't been done before, maybe even have never been thought of until right now.
So the excitement on my part is kind of what your reticence is: we HAVEN'T "figured it out" yet, we're here on the ground floor rather than simply showing up with all the mind-blowing touchpoints already in the distant past. We get to see (and experience) it all happen in real time as we go. That's going to mean tasting a lot of mediocre to outright questionable product, but it also means experiencing that sip that changes everything, somewhere down the line. And I am here for THAT, brother. And I want to taste the shit and the iffy stuff so that mind-blow is extra-specially blow-y. :) (all the double entendres intended there.)
Hell yeah. That's part of why I was surprised to hear someone apparently did figure it out 20 years ago! Anyway, excited to see the results of your trials!
That's wild about the aged de-alc wine! Too bad it's not here in the states, I'd love to try something that blew me away. Personally, I've (Isaac) never had a de-alcoholized red wine that I thought was even remotely good, and rarely one that resembled actual wine -- but I'm eager to change that!
I've had lots of positive experiences with whites and sparkling, though. It's easier to come up with a bar to set for those, because without needing to worry so much about phenolic content and tannins, whites and sparklings sit a little more in the fruit juice space in my mind, where a de-alc sparkling has to taste better than a Martinellis or sparkling soda to be worth considering (especially since a lot of the bad ones just kind of taste like sour water or off fruit juice).
My problem with most de-alcoholized reds is that they are way out of balance. Too sour, overly sweetened to compensate, no tannin structure to speak of. Notes of off fruit or spoiled Welch's grape juice. The best ones I've had more closely resemble wine aromatically, but they lack any inviting characteristics and are often still too sour. At least those ones can offer someone avoiding alcohol a more wine-like experience. But is it better than just having a tea or something? I'm not convinced 😬
We're about to do a pretty epic 19-bottle tasting of de-alc, focusing predominantly on reds, and all on the Premium to Ultra Premium in quality/price points - we want to put the best of the best to the test to figure precisely how far we've actually come thus far, which will give us all a better pov into what the immediate future might portend, vs. the lower shelf brands which reflects what can be done on the cheap and veer more toward past ways of getting the product made.
There's a lot of truly fascinating ideas being tried right now - two of the wines we'll be tasting do a second fermentation like a Champagne, *without the need to de-alc the wine again!* It's wild, and we'll be covering it. But never forget that "innovation" means things that haven't been done before, maybe even have never been thought of until right now.
So the excitement on my part is kind of what your reticence is: we HAVEN'T "figured it out" yet, we're here on the ground floor rather than simply showing up with all the mind-blowing touchpoints already in the distant past. We get to see (and experience) it all happen in real time as we go. That's going to mean tasting a lot of mediocre to outright questionable product, but it also means experiencing that sip that changes everything, somewhere down the line. And I am here for THAT, brother. And I want to taste the shit and the iffy stuff so that mind-blow is extra-specially blow-y. :) (all the double entendres intended there.)
Hell yeah. That's part of why I was surprised to hear someone apparently did figure it out 20 years ago! Anyway, excited to see the results of your trials!