Germans have been producing non-alcoholic wines for over 70 years and that history has led to inventions to improve quality. Leitz’s hometown of Rüdesheim is the historic birthplace of the famous distillery Asbach Uralt. After the war, a fellow vigneron named Carl Jung began a distillery.

Ultimately, Jung could not compete with the local brandy, but he developed a vacuum distillation system which enabled him to lower the temperature at which alcohol could boil off (because the boiling point decreases as atmospheric pressure decreases). Innovations in vacuum distillation have improved in recent years, and Leitz found a producer in Rheinhessen who recently patented a new, completely closed system that allows wine alcohol to boil at 28°C, preserving “wine-like” aromas and characteristics. As we all know, like fat, alcohol is a transporter of flavor, and without it, there needs to be something else to carry those flavors. 35 grams/L does the work for this riesling, though the sugar is nearly eaten up. It isn’t wine, so it’s hard to use wine terminology to describe it, but it does have wine-like aromas: orange citrus, rhubarb and tarragon.