DEALCOLIZED WINE

There are three techniques used to de-alcoholise a finished wine:

VACUUM DISTILLATION

This is a two-stage process which involves transferring the wine through a distillation column at a temperature of 30oC to gently extract the highly volatile compounds; this process is repeated to remove the alcohol. However, some aroma active compounds evaporate with the alcohol.

REVERSE OSMOSIS

This is a form of nanofiltration using a membrane filtration process which filters out the aroma and phenolic compounds before alcohol is removed by distillation. The remaining water is added back into the filtered wine. This method uses large amounts of water and the ethanol removed is too diluted to reuse or repurpose.

SPINNING CONE COLUMN

In this method evaporation is created by the rotation of cones with a vacuum process. The technique is based on distillation and low temperature to reduce the alcohol level. Only a fraction of the wine is fully de-alcoholised with the aromas de-aromatised so that the overall aroma loss is minimised.