Light beer is everywhere. Now, so is light wine.
Wines with lower-than-usual alcohol levels are booming, fueled by a growing interest in wellness trends. Powerful wine companies like Kendall-Jackson, Bota Box and Cupcake have found swift success with these products, which tend to clock 8%-9% alcohol by volume and 80-85 calories per glass. (A regular table wine might be 12%-14% ABV and 120-125 calories.)
This category is poised for better success than wine overall. While sales of full-strength wine are projected to decrease 2% by volume from 2022 through 2026, according to analyst IWSR, low-alcohol wine is slated to grow by 10% during that same period.
These are not natural wines — far from it. Low-alcohol specimens are typically treated with harsh, industrial techniques in order to reduce their alcohol contents. Some are diluted with water. They’re inexpensive, typically around $15 a bottle. They’re denizens of Target and Kroger, not the independent wine shop.
One might think of them as a vinous version of SnackWell’s, the low-calorie, low-fat desserts that were popular in the ’90s: They mostly taste like the real thing, but there’s something off. Some low-alcohol wines have a bitter, almost metallic aftertaste; others taste artificial, like cotton candy or bubble gum. At best, they’re inoffensive and bland, like watered-down wine.
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Yet their ascendancy is undeniable, further evidence of the American wine consumer’s unquenchable desire to drink something that can be called “healthy.” What’s more, low-alcohol wine is particularly popular among younger drinkers, a demographic that the beleaguered wine industry has been desperate to reach. These products aren’t merely the wine industry’s answer to Michelob Ultra — they’re also its attempt to capture the White Claw crowd.
“We in the wine industry just sat idle and watched hard seltzer eat our lunch,” said Grant Hemingway, co-founder of low-alcohol wine brand Libby, headquartered in Napa. With Libby, Hemingway hoped to capture some of the features that have made White Claw so attractive to twentysomethings: a low enough alcohol content (5%) that someone can drink several servings without becoming catatonic; and a label that clearly states its calorie count (100 per can) and carbs (2 grams).
“Wine has never done that — we hide the alcohol,” said Heidi Scheid, executive vice president of Monterey’s Scheid Family Wines. When she launched the low-alcohol brand Sunny with a Chance of Flowers in 2020, it was a major shift from the traditional approach to wine labeling, where the ABV typically appears in a small, faint font on the back label. The Sunny wines display their facts prominently on the front: 85 calories, zero sugar, 9% alcohol.
That message has proven effective. Sunny with a Chance of Flowers sold 85,000 cases last year. It’s “the breakout brand of our portfolio,” Scheid said.
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Creating low-alcohol wines is a complicated process. The main challenge is getting the wine to taste good — since alcohol plays a much more important role in the character of a wine than simply providing an intoxicant.
“Alcohol adds a roundness to the palate,” said Randy Ullom, head winemaker at Sonoma County’s Kendall-Jackson, which came out with a low-alcohol version of its wildly popular Chardonnay in 2020. “There’s a huge difference in the viscosity and how it feels in your mouth.” (Many of a wine’s calories come from alcohol, so reducing it will also automatically reduce the calorie content.)
Winemakers working in this space report extensive experiments — Scheid’s team went through more than 100 prototypes — in order to reach a satisfactory taste and texture. There are two main methods for removing alcohol from a wine: reverse osmosis (which forces particles through a membrane, used by Sunny with a Chance of Flowers) and spinning-cone filtration (which uses a vacuum to extract compounds, used by Kendall-Jackson and Bota Box Breeze). Most of the low-alcohol brands are blending these alcohol-removed portions with full-strength wine to improve the mouthfeel.
Libby takes a different approach, combining an arrested fermentation (so that the grape juice’s sugar does not fully convert to alcohol) with a “significant water add,” as Hemingway put it. Unlike some low-alcohol wines, this leaves Libby with some residual sugar — under 1 gram per liter, according to Hemingway. But he also argued his wine is less manipulated than something made with spinning-cone filtration.
“We want it to be pure. That’s where we set ourselves apart from a hard seltzer,” Hemingway said. “No additives, none of that artificial mango flavor.”
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The people are drinking it up, especially women.
Libby’s customer base is largely female, Hemingway said, and Sunny with a Chance of Flowers shows a preference among female Millennials, according to Scheid. These and other low-alcohol brands are packaged with bright colors, feminine-sounding brand names and marketing copy that feels targeted at people who might be on a diet.
But there does appear to be potential across genders, especially in the younger age brackets. According to analyst Wine Intelligence, 60% of U.S. adults aged 21 to 34 are reducing the amount of alcohol they drink — the largest share of any age group. Interestingly, most consumers of low-alcohol wine are not buying it exclusively: Per IWSR, 78% of those buying these bottles also buy full-strength wine.
“We saw younger consumers needed ways to come into the category, making it accessible to the way they want to enjoy wine,” said Kathy Pyrce, vice president of marketing at Bota Box. For the industry, “getting them into wine earlier is just so critical.” Bota Box launched its low-alcohol line, Bota Box Breeze, in 2021, and sold half a million cases last year.
Not everyone is on board, however. A Wine Intelligence survey asked people what would keep them from purchasing low-alcohol wines. Among respondents, 27% said “I dislike the taste,” while 25% said “It’s not really wine.”
They’re right to be skeptical.
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The Chronicle Food + Wine team conducted a tasting of 18 low-alcohol wines. Several were undrinkable, with offputting aromas and flavors: Our descriptions included “sweaty T-shirt,” “dirty diaper” and “cheese.” Others showed plastic-like or candied notes, a far cry from the pure-fruit characteristics that are a hallmark of regular wines.
They weren’t all so bad. Some we found palatable, if unexciting and nondescript. Terms like “thin” and “watered-down” were mentioned again and again. The magic that I seek in wine — an indelible, joy-sparking expression of flavor — was missing here. The sparkling, white and rosé wines were much more successful than red wines, some of which had unpleasantly gritty tannins.
If you want to reduce your alcohol or calorie consumption, my advice would be to simply drink fewer servings of full-strength wine. But if you must go this low-alcohol route, see below for the bottles I’d recommend you try.
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