You probably know the situation: a business dinner, a family celebration, or simply a nice evening out. You don’t want to drink alcohol, but you don’t want to sit there with sparkling water either while everyone else enjoys a glass of wine with their meal. You look at the drinks menu – and under “alcohol-free” you find soft drinks, juices and perhaps an alcohol-free beer.
Yet the quality of alcohol-free wines has improved enormously in recent years. So why are they still the exception in restaurants?
Hadi Farid, PhD, recently published a compelling analysis of exactly this question on LinkedIn (“The Gastronomy Challenge for Premium Non-Alcoholic Wine: From Availability to Demand”). His core argument: the problem is no longer in the glass – it is in the business model. We have summarised the key points and added the perspective from our own Swiss practice.
Availability is not the same as demand
Wine expert Dr Klaus Postmann puts the structural problem in a nutshell: as long as fast-food and casual-dining chains don’t serve wine-based beverages, the category keeps losing market share.
Beer and ready-to-drink products long ago made themselves at home in precisely those moments when people want something quick and uncomplicated: after work, with takeaway, on a Sunday afternoon. Wine never occupied those occasions – and alcohol-free wine inherits that handicap.
The decisive point: it isn’t enough for a bottle to sit in the cellar. Most guests only order alcohol-free wine when it is actively recommended to them. Without a recommendation from the service team, the bottle stays closed. Availability only creates the possibility; the recommendation creates the first trial.
The real obstacle: who carries the risk?
This is where it becomes a question of economics – and this point explains almost everything.
When you order a bottle from our shop, you carry the risk: maybe you will like the wine, maybe you won’t. That is manageable.
In a restaurant it is the other way round. If an operator opens a bottle for by-the-glass service and sells two glasses a week, the rest becomes a loss. On top of that, alcohol acts as a preservative. Without it, an opened bottle – and in some cases even an unopened one – falls out of peak condition considerably faster. So the operator carries the full risk for a category whose demand they cannot yet predict.
No wonder the service team prefers to recommend what is sure to sell.
What would help
Farid suggests three starting points that strike us as thoroughly realistic:
1. Smaller formats
375 ml bottles or single servings drastically reduce the risk per opened unit. That is exactly why more and more producers are developing smaller formats.
2. Tasting pours instead of persuasion
A small pour before ordering takes the uncertainty away from the guest – and relieves the service team of the feeling that they have to sell something they cannot assess themselves.
3. Different language on the menu
And this is perhaps the most important point of all.
Stop talking about what is missing
To this day the whole category describes itself through an absence: alcohol-free, without alcohol, 0.0 %. That sets the frame – it is about going without.
But a wine list doesn’t say “wine with 13 % alcohol” either. It says how the wine tastes and what it goes with.
That is exactly what the category needs: a description of what the guest gets. Freshness. Structure. An interplay of acidity that works with the food. An alcohol-free Riesling with fish isn’t a fallback – it is a deliberate choice that suits the dish and lets you wake up clear-headed the next morning.
This isn’t a marketing detail. It decides whether the service team recommends the wine with conviction or mentions it apologetically.
The restaurant is the best place to discover
The most important idea in the article: gastronomy isn’t simply another sales channel. It is the place where a category becomes an experience.
Where do you try a wine for the first time in good company, in the right glass, with the right dish and a recommendation to go with it? In a restaurant. And anyone who has experienced that an alcohol-free wine can genuinely carry a menu will buy it for home afterwards.
So gastronomy and online retail aren’t competitors – they reinforce each other. We see this regularly at Alcfree.ch: customers order a wine they drank somewhere else and simply couldn’t forget.
And the traditional wineries?
Farid raises another point that resonates with us: classic wineries – in Germany, for instance – bring enormous technical skill to the table. What many of them lack isn’t cellar technology, but an understanding of a young market: who buys this? In what moment? Through which channel?
Product quality is the prerequisite. On its own, though, it isn’t enough to build a new category. Encouragingly, more and more long-established houses are taking the step deliberately – a sign that alcohol-free wine is no longer a by-product but a discipline in its own right.
What you can do as a guest
Honestly: the category grows faster when guests ask for it.
- Ask. Even when nothing is on the menu. Many venues have something in the cellar – or will remember the request.
- Say what you are looking for. Not “something alcohol-free”, but “a white wine for the fish, without alcohol”. That changes the entire conversation.
- Give feedback. Praise for a good alcohol-free selection reaches the operator – and justifies the next order.
Conclusion: three steps, not one
Farid sums it up in a sequence worth remembering: availability creates the possibility. The recommendation creates the trial. A viable model keeps the bottle on the list.
The decisive question for producers is therefore not “is our wine good enough?” but: what would it take for a restaurant to recommend it confidently, trial it – and keep it there?
Until that question is answered across the board, one thing holds for everyone who enjoys drinking mindfully: at home, the choice is already yours today.
Discover our selection of alcohol-free wines and sparkling wines – from mineral Rieslings to structured reds and elegant sparkling teas. Every wine can be ordered individually, so you can take your time finding what you like.
Source and inspiration: Hadi Farid, PhD, “The Gastronomy Challenge for Premium Non-Alcoholic Wine: From Availability to Demand”, LinkedIn.
