We embarked on a tasting journey to help any sober-curious folks decide what to buy. The first stop, wine — arguably the most difficult nonalcoholic beverage category to recreate.
If you’ve already tried a nonalcoholic wine, you may be cringing. Drinking wine, especially a red wine, is a challenging experience to recreate sans alcohol. Nonalcoholic white and sparkling wines are traditionally easier to make because the carbonation enhances the flavors people expect from these types of wines.
“With red wine, people want oak, they want tannins, they want dryness. Those are the things that the alcohol molecule holds onto. So when you remove that from the red wine, that’s what goes,” explains Sarah Kate, a sober sommelier who reviews nonalcoholic beverages.
Despite the challenges, Kate feels the industry has come pretty darn close. But it’s important to have the right mindset. “You’re always going to be missing the sting of alcohol, she says. “Even with the best in the world.”
We cautiously headed into testing nonalcoholic wines, clinging to Sarah’s claim that the industry has made significant strides. To our surprise, the red wines received the most positive feedback from our tasting crew compared to the white and sparkling wines.
We agree that nonalcoholic wine is not wine. It’s not a one-to-one comparison. However, our experience tells us there are nonalcoholic wines worth drinking that can deliver a complex drinking experience for the sober curious people who can’t have or don’t want the effects of alcohol.
Like many beginner shoppers, we quickly became overwhelmed when trying to narrow down which nonalcoholic wines to test. Two words: option overload.
To help, we consulted with industry experts for their picks — Sarah Kate, the sommelier behind Some Good Clean Fun, as well as Daniel Stiller and Chris Becker, founders at the nonalcoholic beverage marketplace Better Rhodes.
They shared their top recommendations for red, white, and sparkling nonalcoholic wines. We married their picks with the wines we saw consistently ranked well, and chose three wines in each category to try.
Note: There were a couple of notable red wines we could not get our hands on. The Zeronimo Leonis Blend, an award-winning nonalcoholic wine that is now back in stock, and Studio Null’s Prickly Red. We hope to try these in 2026.
We also chose not to test canned wines or Rosé for this round. Notable picks from the Rhodes team include Wander and Found Sparkling Rosé and Gruvi Dry Secco.
Nonalcoholic beverages are in — and it goes far beyond (or shall we say between?) Dry January and Sober October. In the back half of 2025, Gallup reported a record low for U.S. adults who say they consume booze, falling below 60% for the first time since 1997.
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