Oddbird Sparkling Rosé

The alcohol-free wine industry is still in it’s infancy, but it has come a loooong way in the last year or so, and here’s the proof!

Oddbird are an alcohol-free company making great strides in the 0% wine scene. Their process starts with making a traditional wine – they use excellent grapes from quality growers, and they ferment and age the wine using traditional techniques. We think the aging is crucial here – most 0% wine brands remove the alcohol immediately after fermentation, but Oddbird allows their wine to age as normal before removing the booze. The alcohol content in wine has a huge effect on how wine develops all of it’s crucial flavour compounds in the aging process, and Oddbird allows the time for this to happen before dealcoholization. After the wine has matured, Oddbird uses vacuum distillation to remove the booze – this is the latest technology. Under normal conditions, you would have to heat the wine to around 80 °C to distill the alcohol… but heating wine to this temperature is a very good way of making it taste disgusting. By doing this process in a vacuum, the boiling point of the alcohol is significantly lowered, so the wine is only heated to just above room temperature, which preserves all of those important delicious flavour compounds.

The grapes for this one come from Languedoc in Southern France. It’s dry, sparkling, with delicate flavours of summer berries, green apples and citrus.