In focus: New Zealand’s lighter wine movement
A handful of winemakers in New Zealand have cracked the code on making lower-ABV wines that taste like their stronger counterparts. Edith Hancock finds out how they did it, and what’s next.
John forrest, the proprietor of Marlborough’s Forrest Wines, likes Sauvignon Blanc. He really likes it. He’d like to be able to walk into his local and order a pint of it. “Then we could have fair rounds,” he half jokes over the phone.
We’re not talking about full-fat, 14% ABV wine, thankfully. Forrest has dedicated the past 15 years of his viticultural career to making wines that sit around the 9.5% ABV mark, and produces a range called The Doctors’; a play on one of his favourite Austrian brands, Dr Loosen. Since launching The Doctors’ in 2006, and rolling it out in the UK last year, Forrest now believes he’s not that far away from producing something closer to beer in terms of strength, with no impact on the taste. “Why wouldn’t you want a 4.5% Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that actually tastes like a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc?” he asks.
Changing tastes
Forrest has a point. While climate change has led to hotter growing seasons, sweeter grapes and, ultimately, stronger wine, the world is looking for lighter alternatives. Global wine consumption fell in 2019 by nearly 1% in volume, according to global alcohol tracker IWSR Drinks Market Analysis. It’s the first time in 25 years the research group has recorded such a decline. Meanwhile, data from the US shows that alcohol volumes dropped by 0.8% last year, slightly steeper than the 0.7% decline in 2017. Alcohol-free bars, sober raves and mindful drinking festivals are de rigueur with affluent young professionals who don’t want to lose their cognitive functions in their downtime, and non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer sales have been soaring, even in lockdown. Sadly, “low alcohol” wines, that is those with an ABV of up to 1.2%, haven’t enjoyed the same success. In 2018, low-ABV wine’s value growth stagnated, and volumes fell by 2.1%, according to Kantar data.
The problem was summed up last year by Claire Warner, founder of Aecorn, a sister brand to pioneering non-alcoholic ‘spirit’ Seedlip that creates virtuous alternatives for the dinner table with verjus and acorn extracts. Warner says: “The challenge is if you come to something that’s non-alcoholic expecting to have the same experience as something alcoholic you will be inevitably disappointed because you’re removing what makes wine wine.”
While some companies are launching low-ABV wines with mixed success, others have found it easier to meet the consumer halfway. There are now 60 skus of lighter wine being produced in New Zealand. The country is top producer of not low, but lower-alcohol wines in the world. The category’s growth even prompted the formation of a joint industry initiative of winegrowers, government and wine companies called the NZ Lighter Wines Research Programme, and, in 2014, a NZ$17 million (£8.8m) research and development programme to help more producers join in.
Changing ideas
“The biggest objection to trying lower-alcohol wines is a consumer preconception that less alcohol means poor quality and flavour,” according to Richard Lee, NZ Lighter Wine’s marketing manager. “Unfortunately, many de-alcoholised wines have simply reinforced this perception,” he adds. But wines of 7% ABV to 10% ABV have had more success. Lee says that over the past 15 years, the compound annual growth rate for the category has averaged out at 15%, and now 7% of all Sauvignon Blanc produced in New Zealand is a naturally fermented lighter style.
Forrest is credited as one of the pioneers of the moderate wine movement in New Zealand, but naturally lighter expressions are hardly new. He was inspired by Austrian producers creating the zingy, crisp and clear Kabinett Rieslings that he was already a big fan of.
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Forrest shared a distributor with Dr Loosen at the time, and took some of the wines back to New Zealand in the early noughties and held a tasting in Christchurch. “Every woman in the room said it was lovely to have a wine that was lighter in alcohol, and the lightbulb went off in my brain.” The wellness movement was just picking up at this time, and he knew if he could deliver something at the same standard of New Zealand’s traditional output, he’d be on to a winner. First, he tried making a replica of Ernst Loosen’s Riesling Auslese, but that didn’t work out. Then, he tried removing the alcohol after fermentation, but “after two years of trials I actually thought it was a failure”. Next, he moved on to canopy management, cutting away leaves at certain intervals in the vineyard and monitoring their progress with routine taste testing. Eventually, he managed to get to veraison a week earlier, with lower sugar levels in the grapes but the acidity and phenolics required to make it work in the winery. By 2012, one of the wines in his lower-alcohol range had won a gold medal in a competition.
Forrest is coy when asked how he gets balance and body back into the wine later, but admits that after you’ve taken away 4% of the alcohol “you’ve got to put some character back in”. Last November, he told a room of UK journalists that he uses 14 additives to make up for the loss of body and to improve texture and mouthfeel. But he insists that “there is nothing mystical or magical” or, indeed, uncouth being added to the wines to redress the balance.
Forrest is not the only producer in New Zealand to discover you can avoid removing the alcohol. Natalie Christensen, chief winemaker at Yealands Wine Group, says her employer has a similar approach to making its lighter wines. Yealands sells a lighter Sauvignon Blanc, at 9%, which she says is created with some more severe canopy trimming in the vineyard. “You slow up the brix [sugar] accumulation during the ripening period, but still experience acid degradation and flavour development,” she says. Although Yealands is looking into de-alcoholisation, Christensen adds: “For now we are really enjoying crafting lighter wines as naturally as we can.” Pernod Ricard-owned Brancott Estate also launched a lighter wine range in 2013, and brought it back to the UK last year after a brief hiatus, as demand for lighter alternatives have soared. Patrick Materman, global head winemaker for Pernod Ricard, said the company retains sugar in its end product by ending fermentation early, “which enhances palate weight, but this is balanced with natural acidity and slightly higher dissolved CO2 levels at bottling, giving a perception of dryness in the wines.” Red Light The NZ Lighter wine initiative has 18 participating wine companies, including all of New Zealand’s largest wine exporters, such as Constellation Brands’ Sessions label, Brancott Estate Flight and Stoneleigh Lighter from Pernod Ricard, Lion Co’s Wither Hills Early Light, Villa Maria, Giesen, Spy Valley, Yealands and Forrest Wines, which according to Lee, is the country’s top lighter-wine brand in the UK.
Red light
One thing all of these brands have in common is that, on the whole, they stick to white or rosé production. Riesling and Pinot Gris, Materman says, “are perhaps the easiest to make, with their aromas and flavours based around floral and citrus terpene compounds”, which help meet consumers’ expectations about flavour and palate. Sauvignon Blanc isn’t as easy, but Brancott Estate has managed it. The missing element is reds. Making lower-ABV reds is “challenging, as the anthocyanins, which contribute the majority of colour, are not fully developed at low grape-sugar levels.” Things could soon change, however. Materman says that Pernod Ricard believes there is a “clear opportunity for a lighter-ABV red wine to be added to the Flight range in the future”. Forrest Wines now has four wines in The Doctors’ range, including a rosé and a lighter red made from Pinot Noir, something of an outlier in the scene.
“A quality Pinot Noir rosé with 9.5% ABV is a no-brainer to have in your range, especially for the summer season, when you’re thirsty and you want wine with lunch,” says Forrest. Pinot Noir, he says, isn’t actually the most ideal variety to work with in terms of low alcohol “but we had to go with it because it’s such a prominent varietal wine in New Zealand”.
Forrest waits for importers and distributors to enquire about a lighter version of something in the company’s portfolio before working on it, but he is interested in other varieties. Before lockdown, Forrest had planned to travel to northern Italy to examine some St. Laurent, a highly aromatic dark-skinned grape thought to have originated in Austria, to see what could be done with it.
Not everyone in New Zealand is convinced this is a sustainable movement. PM Chan of Domaine Thomson in Central Otago warns that climate change will make it harder for producers to manage their growing cycles. “With climate change, wines are more likely to become higher in alcohol, not lower,” she says, “If the vineyard’s ethos is to make wine with as little interference as possible, this could also be quite challenging.” But for now, there’s a lot of optimism from New Zealand’s lighter-wine innovators. Forrest believes bringing in other grape varieties with different ripening rates could help to sustain the category as much as to develop new products, adding triumphantly: “there is no grape variety that can’t be charmed by these processes.”
