"0.0% Doesn't Mean Zero Interest": Non-Alcoholic Wine in Russia — Hype, Market, or the New Normal?

What is non-alcoholic wine and how is it made?

Non-alcoholic wine is wine with an ethanol content not exceeding 0.5%. It's produced using various methods, but always starts with a traditional alcoholic beverage. The most common technologies are vacuum distillation, reverse osmosis, and spinning cone columns.

All three methods "steal" some of the aromatics, so producers must "rescue" the bouquet: working with the original wine material, temperature, speed, and most importantly, not cutting corners on equipment. This leads to the category's first paradox: creating a "zero-degree" beverage essentially requires more technology and money than regular wine.

The experts we spoke with agree on one thing: this is a real product, not an imitation. But it has its own taste — usually drier and "thinner" than conventional wines of the same variety. And consumers still need to be brought around to this taste.

Production bottlenecks: cost, alcohol, and regulations

Russia's main pain point is production economics. Dealcoholization is energy-intensive: equipment, loss of aromatics, technological discipline. Plus there's a legal question: what to do with the alcohol extracted from the wine. If it must be disposed of rather than returned to circulation in another area or sold through legal "white" logistics, the cost multiplies significantly.

"Вина Арпачина" was among the first in Russia to attempt industrial-scale non-alcoholic wine production, purchasing modern equipment from Europe. According to them, creating such a beverage costs more not only due to greater raw material volume, but also additional expenses for infrastructure, electricity, and equipment purchases. Ekaterina Malik, CEO of Вина Арпачина, emphasized in conversation with Argument Media:

Non-alcoholic wine production is undoubtedly more expensive than alcoholic wine, because we make approximately one bottle of non-alcoholic from 1.8 bottles of quality alcoholic wine — that is, a ratio of 1.8 to 1.

Meanwhile, laws related to alcohol add problems for this product that's relatively new to our market. Under current legislation, all alcohol obtained during production cannot be used without an expensive license and special storage facilities. The procedure for its disposal hasn't been established either. This was also emphasized to Argument Media by Aleksandr Stavtsev, Vice President of the Russian Association of Retail Market Experts:Aleksandr Stavtsev:

In non-alcoholic wine production, if you dispose of the alcohol — it becomes a very expensive story, because if we look at the production technology, you need to remove alcohol from a regular bottle of wine, which is up to 15% per liter, and it's clear that if we simply evaporate it, a significant amount of other liquid will evaporate along with the alcohol. Losses exceed 50%.