From de-alcoholised to demonised wines

ecent changes to EU regulations for organic wines to allow de-alcoholisation are not to everyone’s liking in France. In a press release, a visibly irate Confédération Paysanne criticised the fact that “On Wednesday 26 February, the European Commission changed organic regulations to allow organically certified wines to be totally de-alcoholised”. The minority farming organisation views this as “expedited deregulation involving all wines”, lashing out at “an industrial process that is the wrong solution for addressing a major crisis affecting European wine regions and runs counter to the independence of winegrowers and to their economic sustainability”.

Alcohol-free wine companies constantly stress that the purpose of de-alcoholisation is not to absorb surplus wines with no sales outlets: “Quality alcohol-free wine can be one of the solutions but not the solution”, the French No/Low collective has said over and over. For the Confédération Paysanne, “the wine industry crisis cannot be solved by de-alcoholising wines!” It totally refutes the idea of adding an extra string to the industry’s bow.

“The argument by which creating a market segment to kick-start wine consumption is unrealistic”, said the statement, claiming that “dependency on companies specialising in de-alcoholisation – using processes that require costly investments and a lot of energy – drastically reduces the independence of winegrowers […] compared with industrial production using very short pruning and irrigation, and controlling trading companies that can produce large quantities of de-alcoholised wines”.

Another argument heard from alcohol-free-wine critics that has been taken up by the Confédération Paysanne is the paradox of growing vines to produce grapes filled with sugar, “fermenting the grape juice and then de-alcoholising it using lots of energy, additives and stabilisers. Wouldn’t it be wiser to start from the grape juice itself? Unless the aim is to take advantage of wine’s image to misappropriate its name for a product whose only similarity with wine is exactly that, its name”.