The Mondavi family, one of the most storied names in American winemaking, has partnered with Missing Thorn to supply Napa fruit and expand national distribution of dealcoholized wine. It puts a pedigreed Napa name, and real Napa grapes, behind a category that wine traditionalists have been slowest to take seriously.
The timing matters, because non-alcoholic wine is the hard case. Industry data this year put it at 28 percent of alcohol-free products but with the weakest buyer engagement of any segment, and plenty of shoppers unwilling to pay more than a small premium for it. The problem has always been that dealcoholized wine is genuinely difficult to make taste like wine, and that the people most loyal to wine are the most skeptical of the alcohol-free version.
The Cr(af)ted Take
A Mondavi lending a name to alcohol-free wine is the kind of endorsement the category cannot buy any other way. Non-alcoholic beer and spirits have moved faster partly because credible makers got behind them early; wine has lacked that cover. A legacy Napa family treating dealcoholized wine as worth their grapes and their reputation tells skeptics it is a serious wine project, not a gimmick on the bottom shelf.
Whether it moves the numbers depends on the glass, not the label. The weak engagement in non-alcoholic wine is a quality-and-value problem, and a famous name only buys the first pour. But that first pour is the whole battle in this segment, and it helps enormously when the person offering it is someone wine drinkers already trust.
Original reporting: Wine Spectator →