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Welcome.
“Welcome to the best five-minute wine podcast”
with Forrest Kelly.
There's a growing movement in wine right now.
What is that movement? Low alcohol. Low ABV wines are showing up everywhere that people are actually drinking them. People are also eating cauliflower as pizza.
That doesn't mean we celebrate it. OK. What is low ABV wine? ABV stands for alcohol by volume.
Traditional wine runs 12 to 15%.
“Low ABV wines come in under 10%, sometimes,”
as low as 5 to 6%. They achieve this through early harvest, cool climate farming, and sometimes even using spinning cone technology. That removes alcohol after fermentation. Spinning cone technology.
They built a machine, a machine, to suck the soul out of wine. I have a spinning cone. It's called my feelings, and I use it every harvest. Why is it trending?
Well, the sober curious movement is reshaping how people drink.
Younger consumers want their ritual of wine without the next morning consequences. Health conscious drinking is mainstream now. Not a niche. Is it actually any good?
So sour grapes on a dancer. Can low ABV wine actually be good? Fine. Fine. I will admit, the young people are onto something,
not because the wine is good. But because they want to drink at brunch and function at 2pm, this is called survival. In Sicily, we call it Tuesday. So be honest, was it good?
I tasted one last spring, a German resling. 6%, I expected dish water. What I got was acceptable. I told no one, I went home. I stared at the vineyard for 40 minutes.
Bubbly could tell something was wrong. Bubbly saw me standing motionless. Pupils dilated, contemplating the meaning of acceptable. That's when the side I kicked in hard. So if you're looking for low ABV wines, look for Mosell reslings from Germany,
naturally low, high-enacid and food-friendly, avoid anything that has the label "deal galized." That's where quality drops sharply.
“If you must drink less alcohol and apparently many of you must.”
At least do it with dignity. A good Mosell resling, not a canned spa water with great ambitions. This is sour grapes. Bubbly is still upset about the spinning cone. So how are we all?
