The Queen Who Wasn't There

A year ago I found the metaphor I had been hunting for. Inês de Castro — the murdered lover of a Portuguese king who, the legend goes, was exhumed two years after her death, dressed in royal robes, and crowned, while the court was made to bow and kiss her hand. That, I wrote, is dealcoholized wine: something visibly, undeniably dead, paraded in fine glassware, pretending nothing has changed. I ended with a line I still enjoy too much to disown: enough with the corpse-kissing.

The industry did not take it quietly. But here is what nobody in that comment thread knew: eighteen months earlier, I had been arguing their side.

In January 2024 I finished a bottle of dealcoholized red and praised it in public — complex, layered, the acidity just right. That spring, when an anonymous columnist in a trade paper attacked the whole category, I was the one who circulated the rebuttal: an Austrian winemaker’s patient case that dealcoholization belongs to the craft — that one dealcoholizes, another does not, the way one ferments spontaneously and another doesn’t, and that this diversity is what winemaking is. It remains the strongest argument for the category I have read, and I published it under my own name.

What happened between that defense and the corpse was not a change of politics. It was two years of tasting. The exceptions I kept waiting for stayed exceptions; the rule kept asserting itself. The center of gravity of this category is industrial bulk wine run through a machine — anonymous liquid with a vineyard on the label, a copy made by removing the thing that made the original worth copying. Alcohol was never a garnish. It carried texture, aroma, warmth, length; subtract it and no measure of spices and juice repairs the loss. And I noticed something else, rereading my own praise of that January bottle: what I had singled out was the Puerh and the Lapsang Souchong inside it. Even when a dealcoholized wine won me over, it won me over with tea.

So the metaphor stands — for the category’s center. But the comment thread earned its concessions, and honesty requires me to make them. The best examples are real work by serious people, and they improve every vintage. Dealcoholized wine is not a weaker wine but a different drink — lighter structure, shorter finish — that fails at the table mostly because we serve it by wine’s rules instead of writing its own. And for the guest under doctor’s orders, a good bottle served as what it is — not as wine’s understudy — is more welcome than water dressed up as an occasion.

Which turns out to be my whole argument, about every bottle, not just these. Judge a drink by what it is, not by what it isn’t. That is the standard the whole of Beyond Wine is built on: character decides — ingredient integrity, real structure, candor about method. A dealcoholized wine that clears that bar belongs on the list like anything else. Most don’t clear it. The door is open; the bar doesn’t move.

But if you came here looking for dealcoholized wine, stay a moment — because the most interesting things I’ve poured since I stopped trying to resurrect the queen were never wine at all. Verjus with a vinous spine. Wild ferments with living acidity. Sparkling teas built like grand cuvées — the leaf no longer hiding inside someone else’s bottle. They are not copies of anything, and nobody had to exhume them.

They’re alive, the lot of them. Which is the only quality I’ve ever really been after.

— Roman Sydorenko