The non-alcoholic aisle speaks three dialects at once — legal labelling, production engineering, and marketing — and they don't agree with each other. This glossary translates all three into plain language. It's the vocabulary the rest of this site uses, one definition per term, no hedging.
Labels and law
Non-alcoholic (NA). In the US, legally means under 0.5% ABV — not zero. The single most misunderstood term in the category.
Alcohol-free. On a US label, formally reserved for genuinely 0.0% products — but used loosely in marketing everywhere. Trust the printed number, not the phrase.
0.0%. The strict claim: no detectable alcohol, verified to the label's stated precision. It costs real engineering to achieve in a dealcoholized wine, so producers who get there print it loudly on the front label. The tier that matters for pregnancy, recovery, medication interactions, and religious observance.
Dealcoholized / alcohol-removed. The honest engineering terms: real wine was fermented first, then had its alcohol removed. If neither word (nor an equivalent) appears, you may be holding grape juice in a wine costume.
ABV. Alcohol by volume — the percentage of the liquid that is ethanol. Regular wine runs 11–15%; the entire non-alcoholic category lives between 0.0% and 0.5%, and trace levels under 0.5% are comparable to kombucha and some very ripe fruit.
Trace alcohol. The 0.0–0.5% residue left in most dealcoholized wine after processing. It's physiologically negligible at a glass's quantity, but whether it matters for pregnancy, recovery, medication, or observance is a personal or clinical question — which is why the strict 0.0% tier exists and why we only credit it when a label prints it.
Production
Vacuum distillation. Removing alcohol under vacuum so it boils off at low temperature (as low as ~95°F), sparing the aroma compounds. The premium method — Leitz and Oddbird territory. (All methods explained →)
Spinning cone column (SCC). Wine cascades over spinning cones in a vacuum in ultra-thin films; aroma is stripped and saved on a first pass, alcohol removed on a second, aroma returned after. Fast, industrial, very good — Giesen and Fre use it.
Reverse osmosis (RO). Membrane filtration separating alcohol and water from flavor concentrate, then reblending without the alcohol. Precision depends heavily on the producer.
Arrested (restricted) fermentation. Stopping fermentation early so little alcohol ever forms, rather than removing it afterward. It preserves freshness and skips the trauma of dealcoholization, but leaves more grape sugar behind — which is why arrested-fermentation bottles usually sit at the sweeter end of the shelf.
Aroma recovery. Capturing volatile aroma compounds during dealcoholization and adding them back afterward. The difference between wine-like and hollow; the best producers advertise it.
Never-fermented. Grape juice (sometimes dressed with tea or verjus) styled as wine. Not dealcoholized wine — a different, sweeter drink. Not a slur, just a category boundary.
Grape must. Freshly crushed grape juice, the raw material of all wine. Producers sometimes add a little back after dealcoholization to restore body honestly; too much and the wine drifts toward juice, which is the "fresh must" character our aroma wheel flags.
Tasting — including the NA tells
Body. The weight of wine in your mouth — substantially carried by alcohol, per the sensory research, which is why non-alcoholic wine tops out around medium body.
Residual sugar (RS). Sugar left (or added) in the finished wine, in grams per liter or per serving. Above roughly 5–7g per glass, added sweetness is usually doing alcohol's old job.
Brut / extra dry. Sparkling sweetness tiers — and counterintuitively, brut is drier than extra dry. Most Prosecco-style NA fizz is extra dry.
Tannin. The grippy, structural feel in red wine. Without alcohol to cushion it, it can read tea-like — see below.
Confected. Candied-fruit character, the classic tell of sugar added back for body. The most common flaw in the category.
Tea tannin. Astringent, tea-like grip — tannin exposed without alcohol's padding, or supplemented tannin announcing itself. Taste over-steeped black tea and you know the sensation exactly; in a non-alcoholic red it reads as backbone in small doses and sternness in large ones.
Hollow mid-palate. The empty middle where alcohol's body used to be: the wine arrives with aroma, vanishes on the tongue, then finishes — like a sentence missing its verb. The single most common structural flaw in dealcoholized wine, and the hardest one for producers to fix honestly.
Fresh must. Grape-juice character peeking through — that just-crushed, Concord-adjacent sweetness that says the drink is closer to the vineyard than to the cellar. Pleasant in small doses, especially in rosé; a tell that winemaking got skipped when it dominates.
These four tells are first-class vocabulary on our aroma wheel, where every bottle we cover is tagged with them — flaws included.
Culture
Sober curious. Questioning the default drink without swearing an oath about it. The movement, explained →
Damp drinking. Drinking less and more deliberately rather than not at all — fewer drinks, chosen on purpose, often alternated with non-alcoholic ones. The most common real-world pattern among people who buy this category.
Zebra striping (alternating). Alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks through an evening — the single most common way this category is actually consumed, and the reader this site is written for.
Dry January / Sober October. The calendar's two structured alcohol-free months — a fixed start, a fixed end, and permission to treat not-drinking as an experiment rather than an identity. A full playbook exists for people who like structure.
Mocktail. A non-alcoholic cocktail — juice, syrup, and garnish doing their best. Nothing wrong with one at the bar, but it answers a different question than wine does at dinner, which is why this site exists: the dinner table deserves a drink built for food, not a dessert in a glass.
Put the vocabulary to use
Start where the terms meet actual bottles: the ranked non-alcoholic wine guide, the interactive aroma wheel, or the production methods deep-dive.
