Blurred Vines Spark Alt Wine (£16, thewinesociety.com) Since writing last week’s column on the steady improvement in the quality of non-alcoholic wine, I’ve been, as I always am at this time of the year, bombarded by statistics about the rise in teetotalism and what the marketers have decided to call “sober curiosity”. According to Alcohol Concern, something in the region of 9 million people are taking a month off drinking for Dry January this year. And for the most part they (at the time of writing, we) are as likely to look for soft drinks that are interesting in and of themselves as opposed to de-fanged versions of their favourite booze. In my view, examples of the former are in any case the most interesting of the new ‘no-lo’ drinks that have emerged in the past couple of years. Drinks such as Blurred Vines red Spark and white Sharp, both skilfully fermented blends of tea and a range of botanicals, are wonderfully complex, satisfying drinks that, despite their name, are not so much wine as their own delicious new thing.
Feragia & Tonic (£30, 12 x 25cl cans, feragia.com) Both the Blurred Vines concoctions play with spice (chilli) and bitterness, as well as tea tannins, to create the kind of complexity of mouthfeel and flavour that is what I miss most when I’m abstaining from alcohol. There’s a similar interplay at work in another of my favourite new no-lo drinks, the Scottish brand Feragia, a fabulously complex 0% abv spirit from Fife distilled from cayenne pepper, ancho chilli kaffir lime, apple and hibiscus among other things which works brilliantly, both (£26.35, for a 70cl bottle, feragia.com) or with tonic or ginger ale in pre-mixed cans. My wine-writing colleague Matthew Jukes’s foray into non-alcoholic wine-alikes, Jukes Sparkling Pinot Noir (£10.25, 4 x 25cl cans, Waitrose), meanwhile, takes a different route: macerating pinot noir grape skins in cider vinegar. The results are an acquired taste: I had to get past my scepticism about drinking vinegar, but by the second can, I was craving the vinegary kick and delighting in the red-fruited pinot noir notes.
You + I Ginger Kombucha (£2.95, 30cl bottle, kombuchawarehouse.com) Tea is at the base of much that is good and interesting in the no-lo world. There is a whole world of single-estate tea that I intend to explore much more thoroughly in this year – tea culture, with its concentration on terroir and varieties, having so much in common with wine. For Dry January, however, I’ve found cold drinks made using tea to be the most versatile alternatives for filling in the wine-shaped hole in an evening meal. That could mean sparkling tea blends, such as the racy, gently grassy (chamomile) Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Blue (£16.95, spiritskiosk.com) or the subtly floral, wonderfully dry Jing Jasmine Pearls Sparkling Tea (£21, jingea.com). More often it means kombucha, the tangy, non-alcoholic brew from fermented tea, as made by modern British masters of the form such as You + I (I particularly like the spiciness of the ginger and the citrussy clarity and savoury depths of the Lime and Sea Salt, £2.95, thewinesociety.com) and LA Brewery (the fragrantly red-fruited Sparling English Blush Kombucha, £9.50, 75cl, thewinesociety.com).
Follow David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
