Before I get to global news, a bit of site news – while I was speaking at Unified Wine Symposium this week – the US’s largest wine-trade show – the rest our team published yet more tasting notes on 2023 burgundies; Julia provided notes on old-vine wines from 17 countries; Alder updated us on the headway that Italian grape varieties are making in California; and we published nine unedited personal accounts of harvest and winemaking in war-torn areas. Plus, we re-released yet another episode of Vintners’ Tales yesterday, originally filmed in 1998, featuring Adam de la Falaise Brett Brett-Smith, the managing director of one of the UK’s oldest independent wine businesses, Corney & Barrow. Please do read and watch!
On to the news!
Accolade and Albert Heijn sign Bottle Weight Accord
Accolade Wines is one of the biggest wine companies in the world. Their Berri Estates is the largest-production brand in the southern hemisphere. Albert Heijn is the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, with more than a third of the country’s market share.
This week it was announced that both companies, along with the boutique Stellenbosch winery Botanica Wines, have signed the Sustainable Wine Roundtable Bottle Weight Accord. In agreement with the accord, these businesses will reduce the average weight of their 750-ml still-wine bottles to 420 g (1,170 g full) or below by the end of 2026.
With these latest additions, signatories to the Bottle Weight Accord now make up around 5% of global wine production.
South African wine on the rise
It may not be much of a rise, but South Africa did defy the global wine market in 2024 and managed to grow wine exports by value by 4.3% – though volumes remained stable at 306.2 million litres. While the UK continues to be the largest export market for South African wines, it imported 5% less by value in 2024. Growth occurred in the second and third largest markets – Germany and the Netherlands. Germany imported 4% more by value and the Netherlands imported a whopping 20% more.
Promising research on smoke taint
On 23 January WineBusiness reported that Washington State University had found that barrier sprays – a blanket term for a number of coatings that can be applied to grape bunches – can be effective in preventing smoke taint … as long as you wash the spray off after smoke exposure. In 2021 researchers at the university sprayed kaolin and bentonite clays (both present in face creams and certain oral supplements) on grapes prior to smoke exposure. They then washed the clay off grapes within seven days after exposure and found that it significantly reduced the smoke compounds in the final wine. The team at WSU conducted another trial in 2024 and are still analysing results.
Environmentally friendly non-alcoholic wine
This is my favourite story this week.
The growth of lo- and no-alcohol beverages has worried me for more reasons than just cutting into wine sales – de-alcoholisation is an invasive and energy-intensive process. It requires that you make a wine, beer or cider and then go through the extra step of putting it through either a reverse-osmosis machine or a spinning cone column – both of which require a good bit of energy. (If you’d like to read more about these machines, I highly recommend Julia’s story on de-alcoholisation.) The result is that you break a wine into component parts – water, alcohol, flavours – that you then have to piece back together sans the alcohol. It affects quality, requires more work, is more expensive, and is much more energy intensive than regular wine production.
But on 26 January, Vitisphere published an article detailing how the organic wine company Domaine Villa Noria is making zero-alcohol wines by using non-Saccharomyces yeasts and bacteria. The wine is being sold under the brand name Levin. The company has been honing their patented mix of yeasts and bacteria for three years and the selected strains consume sugar and produce lactic acid and CO2 – not alcohol. The owner of the project, Fabien Gross, a winemaker from Alsace, described his last few years to Vitisphere: ‘I failed a lot of tests and invested almost 2 million euros in equipment, particularly for pasteurisation, but in the end I managed to market a drink containing only 4.8 grams of sugar per 100 ml, made without any inputs, without added flavours, without sulphites, without metabisulphite or potassium sorbate, without citric acid, without anything!’ Gross packages this wine, made from organic grapes, in reusable bottles. The carbon footprint is 70% lower than the average de-alcoholised wine.
Apparently, some wine producers are up in arms because they believe that fermentation requires sugar being converted to alcohol. They don’t believe that Levin should be able to be sold as wine. I’m of a different mindset. Kimchi is fermented. It’s not alcoholic. We can be flexible. Also, it’s a huge win for the grape industry if we can manage to make non-alcoholic wine that actually tastes good. So far, sparkling tea in wine bottles seems to be the best-tasting ‘non-alcoholic wine’ we have and, while it’s a great beverage, it’s not wine and it’s not helping grape farmers. I’d love to try Levin. Please let me know if you’ve tried it and liked it!
That’s all for this episode of the wine news. The next newscast will be on 14 February as I will be in London next week for the MW seminar. For 8 February, in place of this newscast, I’ve written a piece on breaking into wine communication. Do check the site for that! And as I say every week, if you enjoy this newscast and would like to see it continue, please subscribe to JancisRobinson.com. And if you have breaking news in your area, please email [email protected].
This is a transcript of our weekly five-minute news broadcast, which you can watch below. You can also listen to it on The Wine News in 5 Podcast. If you enjoy this content and would like to see more like it, please subscribe to our site and our weekly newsletter.
