Christine, James & Joe's House Wine
Michelin-Star Non-Alcoholic = Best on the Planet (We've Tried Hundreds)
We've Poured. Nobody Has Ever Guessed These Are N.A.

Dear Artisans,

We all need a break sometimes — what none of us wants is to be punished for taking one.

That is the part the non-alcoholic aisle has never solved. There is an entire long, busy working day sitting between you and the first glass you are actually allowed to enjoy, and the options for the eleven hours before that are, to be blunt, insulting. So we went looking. We have tasted hundreds and hundreds of non-alcoholic bottles over the years, and I want to be precise about the results — almost none of them were worth anybody’s time.

The reason is the process. Take a finished wine, run it through a centrifuge or a heat column to strip the alcohol out, and you strip out most of the aroma and all of the body along with it — what is left tastes like water with a memory. So the producer panics and dumps sugar back in, and now it tastes like flat, expensive apple juice. Given the choice between that and a glass of sparkling water, the sparkling water wins every single time, and everybody in the trade knows it.

And then a friend poured us a Layla.

Markus Huber does it the hard way — which turns out to be the only way. Layla starts as an actual wine: real fruit off his own vineyards, fully fermented, then aged around twelve months in steel tank on its lees the way you would treat a serious sparkling base. Only after all that does the alcohol come out, and it comes out cold, through reverse osmosis, rather than being cooked off. You are not drinking a de-alcoholized shortcut. You are drinking a year-old wine that had one ingredient removed.

You can taste the difference immediately, and so can everyone else. Joe, Christine and I all drink these regularly, and over the past several months we have poured them for a lot of customers at the shop without mentioning what they were. Not one person guessed — not one detected a trace. The reveal has produced some of the best facial expressions of my retail career.

He took over four hectares at twenty-one.
He now owns Austria’s best wine.

Markus Huber is the tenth generation of his family to farm in the Traisental, Austria’s smallest and youngest DAC, where reddish limestone soils and cool nights push ripening as much as two weeks later than the warm regions to the east. He took the reins in 2000, aged twenty-one, with four hectares. He has since grown the estate past fifty and converted every last row to certified organic farming.

His rule is unfashionably simple. “The best wines are made in the vineyard. In the cellar, we can only make mistakes.” On the 100-point score he is even less impressed with himself — “It is an honour, of course, but wine is subjective. The same wine that scores 100 today might be rated 97 tomorrow.” This is not a man doing a novelty product for the wellness aisle.

Those wines are allocated, spoken for, and not what this email is about. This email is about what he does with the same fruit, the same cellar and no alcohol at the end of it.

Here is the other number that matters: only 25 calories a glass. Which is essentially nothing — and I mean that arithmetically. I have worked my way through most of a bottle over breakfast with zero guilt and zero effect on the rest of my day, while still getting a real wine pairing with my eggs. Try that with a 'big ol' Cab' at eight in the morning and see how the eleven o’clock meeting goes. It could be fun; probably not.

Here is where I actually keep running into these bottles: on the pairing menus of Michelin-starred dining rooms, printed on the same page as wines carrying four and five figures. Not buried in a sad little non-alcoholic box at the bottom of the list. Not produced apologetically for the one guest who is not drinking — poured in sequence, course by course, as a deliberate part of the meal. That is the only test in this category I take seriously. A beverage director sitting on a cellar full of grand cru does not hand a zero-proof bottle to a paying guest unless it can hold the table next to what is downstairs.

And they do hold it, because they are genuinely gastronomic wines. There is enough aromatic lift for a raw first course, enough acid and texture to sit under fish or a cheese service, and enough length that the pairing still reads as a pairing rather than a pause in one. They are as beautiful to drink as the bottles they share the page with, and I do not hand that sentence out to this category lightly.

Layla Non-Alcoholic Sparkling

Gelber Muskateller is the grape you want for this job and almost nobody uses it, because it is a nuisance to grow and impossible to hide behind. It is also the most aromatic white grape in Austria — which means that when you take the alcohol away there is still an enormous amount left in the glass.

Apple blossom and mandarin rind on the nose, jasmine and a twist of nutmeg behind them. The palate is textured rather than thin, with white apple, lime zest, a little herbal savouriness, and a fine persistent bead that lasts the length of the glass. It finishes dry with an elderflower echo. Falstaff gave it 91 points in their 2025 dealcoholized trophy tasting, which in that category is an extremely loud number.

Drink it as an aperitif, with salads, with roast chicken or turkey, or with asparagus, which is the pairing Huber himself pushes and which is annoyingly perfect.

Layla Non-Alcoholic Sparkling Rose

The Rose is the one that converts the sceptics, and it is a completely different wine from the white rather than the same juice with a blush. Huber builds it from Pinot Noir and Zweigelt, Austria’s signature red grape, which brings a sour-cherry lift that no aromatic white grape can give you.

Pale copper-pink in the glass. Wild strawberry and redcurrant, a little blood orange, a fine chalky texture underneath and a finish that stays dry and savoury instead of going soft and sweet like every rose spritzer you have been handed at a wedding. This is the bottle Christine reaches for.

It is also the one that does the heavy lifting at the table: it will handle charcuterie, a tuna sandwich, spicy noodles, or the second half of a Sunday afternoon with equal composure.

Hundreds Tasted.
Seven Bottles Kept.

Duche de Longueville French Sparkling Cider

This has been the best selling non-alcoholic bottle in our shop for eighteen straight years — and it has never once been the trendy choice. It comes from a fifty-year-old orchard near Dieppe where fifteen apple varieties are harvested and pressed separately, then held at controlled temperature until blending.

Red apple, green apple, a hint of sweet dried apple, a lively bead and absolutely no added anything. You can forget all about Martinelli’s. Many of America’s finest restaurants carry it as the only non-alcoholic bottle on the wine list, which tells you everything about how it behaves next to real wine.

Contrattino Non-Alcoholic Aperitivo

From Contratto, the 1867 Canelli house now run by Giorgio Rivetti of La Spinetta, who has never once done a half-hearted version of anything. Contratto was making a tonic aperitivo digestivo in the 1930s, which makes this arguably the original ready-to-drink, returning after a fifty-year absence.

Over thirty botanicals, including Madagascar vanilla, orange, tangerine, lime, elderflower, rose, cinchona and rhubarb, coloured with organic black carrot and blended with Alpine water. Bitter, herbaceous, citrusy and properly effervescent in a red-blush art deco bottle. Five dollars, one serving, no compromise, and nothing on the label you need to apologise for.

Allendorf "Save Water Drink Riesling"

The best-named bottle in the store and, more usefully, the still white that actually holds up when there are no bubbles left to distract you. Riesling is the right grape for de-alcoholized wine for the same reason it is the right grape for the Mosel: its acidity does the structural work that alcohol normally does.

Fresh citrus aromatics, a proper Riesling nose, and a balance of sweetness against seven grams of acidity that keeps it mouthwatering rather than cloying. Excellent straight, and genuinely good in a spritz if you want to stretch a bottle across an afternoon.

Strauch "Blanc Pur" Riesling Sekt

Tim and Isabel Strauch merged their parents’ estates in 2011 in Osthofen and built a house that does everything the long way: organic farming across twenty-five hectares, hand harvesting, whole-grape pressing, traditional bottle fermentation and extended lees ageing.

The base here is a dry, dealcoholized wine, not sweetened carbonated juice — and the difference is immediate. It looks, feels and tastes like a good traditional-method sekt, which is the entire and very difficult point. If you want the most serious bottle on this list, this is it.

Dr. Loosen "DR. LO" Riesling Sparkling

The Loosen family has been growing Riesling in the Mosel for over two hundred years, so when Erni Loosen puts his own initials on an alcohol-free bottle he is not doing it casually.

Frothy, generous bubbles carrying pineapple and mango with a lick of lime zest, then a palate that is all tropical fruit and foamy lightness before finishing off-dry with Riesling’s customary snap. A summer party in a glass, at eleven in the morning if you like.

A break should not
feel like a downgrade.

A man who has made three separate wines that James Suckling scored ninety-nine and one hundred points, who was Austria’s Winemaker of the Year, and who owns the current number one wine in the country, decided to spend his time perfecting the thing nobody else could get right. That is the whole story. The reason Layla is good is that a genuinely great winemaker refused to treat it as a side project.

Twenty-four ninety-seven. Zero point zero percent. Under thirty calories. Buy the pair, put them in the door of the fridge, and stop apologising for Tuesday.

Prost,

— James Tran

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