Why Creating a Quality Non-Alcoholic Vermouth Substitute is So Difficult

Most of the non-alcoholic spirits and liqueurs on the market are water-based products that are infused and sometimes redistilled with botanicals, essential oils, and other flavorings; and sometimes they have added sugar to give body and structure. While there are nonalcoholic wines on the market, few if any of the spirit/liqueur replacements have included dealcoholized wine as a base. 

Martini & Rossi has released two nonalcoholic vermouth substitutes with exactly that: a white, Floreale and red, Vibrante. These launched at the beginning of the pandemic and were promoted mostly in Europe at first, yet in just a few years they have sold 1.5 million liters of the products. 

Beppe Musso and Ivano Tonutti, photo courtesy Martini & Rossi

The products (legally they’re not “non-alcoholic vermouth” as vermouth is a controlled label in the EU; the bottles are labelled as “dealcoholized wine aperitif”) are the creation of Martini’s Master Blender, Giuseppe “Beppe” Musso, and Senior Master Herbalist Ivano Tonutti. I was able to sit down with them, along with Master Herbalist Alessandro Garneri, at the San Francisco cocktail bar Trick Dog at the beginning of a promotional tour in the United States.

Musso typically speaks about winemaking, while Tonutti is responsible for procuring and overseeing the processing of the botanicals. Both men had their work cut out for them in developing the new line. Musso said, “Our approach was to be able to prepare a true Martini aperitivo without the alcohol, and we realized that to maintain the key points we had to maintain the wine; not use flavored water. It was two years of research into dealcoholization of wine.” 

Wine imparts body to the final nonalcoholic product, and it also provides acidity that helps to preserve and protect the botanicals within it. (In alcohol-based products, the alcohol acts as a  preservative and also gives that body.) Tonutti and Musso say that with wine as a base, these nonalcoholic products can stand up better to dilution when mixed into cocktails. Using alcohol-removed wine seems to solve a lot of problems… if you can solve the problem of how to make high-quality dealcoholized wine.  

Removing Alcohol from Wine

There are a few different technologies used to remove alcohol from wine, and they are explained very well in this Smithsonian article. Three main technologies are a column still with spinning cones, reverse osmosis filtration, and the method used at Martini: vacuum distillation in a column still. 

The still they use is an 18 meter (59 feet) tall glass column still. The reduction of pressure in the still allows for distillation at lower temperatures (89 Fahrenheit rather than the typical boiling point of ethanol at 172 degrees) that will not cook and alter the flavor of the wine as much. 

Typically, in a continuous column still, the fermented ingredients like beer or wine are poured into the top of the column while steam is pumped in from the bottom. The lighter alcohol molecules are stripped from the rest of the liquid and carried upward, and purified alcohol is pulled off near the top of the column. The nonalcoholic liquids and solids are pulled off (and recycled or discarded) from the bottom. Here though, the nonalcoholic liquid is the intended product, and it is the alcohol pulled off at the top that is set aside. The resulting wine has been dealcoholized. 

I asked Musso why, if their dealcoholization process is so great, did they not also make nonalcoholic table wines and sparkling wines yet. He replied that the grapes used for the vermouths and nonalcoholic products are purposefully nonaromatic varieties, to provide a blank canvas on which to let the botanicals shine. Additionally, because they remove alcohol in production and cannot add the typical fortifying neutral spirit at the end, they actually have to use more wine to make nonalcoholic products than in their regular vermouths.

Botanicals Without (Much) Booze

Alcohol is great at extracting the active components from plants (their flavor and/or their medicinal qualities), as well as at preserving them. Not much alcohol is needed to accomplish this for most botanicals, but the vermouth makers didn’t have much wiggle room. Tonutti said that the volume of alcohol used in creating these botanical extractions would bring the final ABV of the vermouths higher than the legal nonalcoholic limit (less than .5% ABV), so again new technologies had to be employed.

In making Martini vermouths the usual way, some botanicals are distilled, and others are macerated in high proof alcohol. These resulting alcohol-based flavors are added to the wine, along with a touch of sugar, coloring caramel (for the sweet vermouth), and fortifying neutral alcohol to bring it to the desired final proof. 

"Supercritical fluid extractor (extraction chamber)" is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For the nonalcoholic vermouth, they turned to Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE) technology instead of extractions in high-proof alcohol. A supercritical fluid is a compressed (pressurized) fluid with the combined properties of being in the gaseous and liquid states. It can diffuse through solid substances like a gas, and also dissolve materials like a liquid. (A pretty good explainer is here). This technology is used in processes including making decaffeinated coffee and extracting essential oils for perfumes. It can also be used to sterilize old books, according to Tonutti. 

In SFE at Martini & Rossi, supercritical carbon dioxide (along with a little ethanol as a co-solvent) dissolves plant extracts. They then separate the extraction from the CO2 gas, which is recycled (and comes recycled from a brewery in the first place). 

For Martini products, the botanicals are grouped together before extraction, rather than the blended together afterward. While SFE extracts the top notes of botanicals well, it cannot do the same for the important bitter base botanicals probably including gentian, rhubarb root, and cinchona that are found in many vermouths and amari. These are processed in yet another method wherein they’re infused into alcohol and then dried into a powder.