As more people go teetotal, their options are rapidly expanding. Paul Little looks into the drinks you can have when you’re not having a drink.
Do you still enjoy a drink? Don't worry, you're not alone. About 80 per cent of us consume alcohol during the year, a figure that has wobbled only a couple of percentage points either way for several years now.
Do you sometimes overdo it? Plenty of company there, too. About 20 per cent of us – more than 800,000 people – drink dangerously, and the cost of alcohol-related harm is estimated at around $7.85 billion a year. Alcohol excise tax earned $1.2 billion last year, which means if you don’t drink, you are paying for most of the damage done by those who do.
Back in the 70s and 80s, when we first started to fret about the road toll, an advertising campaign for a non-alcoholic "whisky" called Claytons was so successful the name still survives Down Under as a synonym for something ersatz or not genuine. But Claytons disappeared from Aotearoa many decades ago. Until recently, if you didn't want to drink alcohol on a night out, your choices were water, juice, soft drinks or the dreaded lemon, lime and bitters.
Most so-called substitutes – Claytons was no exception – tasted like they had recently been inside a weasel. The sober-curious or those who identified as non-winery struggled to find acceptable low-alcohol or non-alcoholic drinks that let them feel grown up.
There was a tipping point around the time British "distilled non-alcoholic spirits" maker Seedlip was founded in 2014. Since then, the number of spirit-adjacent offerings on the market has expanded rapidly. Here, the alcohol-averse can also choose potions from the Australian brand Lyre's, as well as local producers Ecology & Co, Finery Cocktails and AF. The latter is trialling the country's first non-alcoholic drinks outlet on Auckland's Ponsonby Rd – a pop-up venture called the Curious AF Bottle Shop, which will be open until the end of this month.
Major breweries and vineyards are also jostling for space in the "low-no" market with their own offerings.
"There used to be two occasions when people didn't drink," says Sydney-based restaurant owner and Lyre's "global flavour architect", David Murphy. "When they were driving and when they were pregnant."
Factors most frequently credited with driving the move include the wellness mindset, reduced enthusiasm for getting wasted among young people, and increased concern about individual health, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even climate change is having an effect, among those who are conscious of how much water it takes to make a glass of beer – up to 60 litres of water to one litre of beer.
The "Go on, have another, what's wrong with you?" culture is also shifting. According to research from brewing giant Lion, 91 per cent of males said they wouldn't be fussed if a mate didn't drink on a night out, and 65 per cent said they would feel fully comfortable not drinking themselves. Lion carried out this survey last year to "celebrate" the launch of its alcohol-free beer Speight's Zero.
Not that the breweries need to look at repurposing their vats just yet. "We shut down our pubs during lockdown, and overall consumption went up," says Alcohol Healthwatch executive director Dr Nicki Jackson. "Twenty per cent of drinkers increased their consumption. That was shown during the April 2020 lockdown, and then it was replicated again in the August 2021 lockdown. Heavy drinkers drank more, and it's the lighter drinkers that drink less."
It's hard to put an exact figure on the uptake of low-no alternatives. Various cognitive biases lead us to think something is more prevalent just because it is new. We're so used to seeing aisles and aisles of wines in the supermarket that the likes of New World's alcohol-free Zero Zone really stick out.
"Whenever the big guys get involved, you know it's a thing," says Auckland wine expert Mary-Therese Blair, aka MermaidMary. Seedlip, for example, has been owned since 2019 by big guys Diageo, which also owns Guinness and Johnnie Walker.
MermaidMary cites international research predicting that the total volume sales of low-no alcohol products are going to increase globally "by 31 per cent by 2024, which is quite huge". But even that would only "equate to 3.5 per cent volume share of the total".
Young people are also turning off alcohol, to the relief of parents, ambulance drivers and others who deal with the consequences of overindulgence.
Dame Susan Bagshaw is a GP and youth health specialist who has spent 40 years working in this area. "Around the world, the really clear message from all the studies is that under-18s are drinking less," she says. "They've seen that parents drink themselves to death and are violent and all that kind of stuff. And they are put off."
But although some young people are drinking less, 22 per cent of secondary students are still binge-drinking once a month, and the national average consumption remains about nine litres a year, thanks to heavier drinkers.
"The industry relies on heavy drinkers to maintain their profits," says Jackson. "Forty-six per cent of all alcohol drunk in this country is consumed in very-heavy-drinking occasions. The industry is not in business to take those people and put them into no- or low-alcohol products."
That leaves the moderate or non-drinkers and the sober-curious to drive the market for low-no initiatives. Plenty of producers are ready to help stock up the mocktail cabinet. The crucial difference is that the new lot are hitting those elusive marks of flavour, complexity, depth, mouthfeel, texture and – for want of a better word – bite that alcoholic drinks have and the alternatives, until recently, did not. It's not easy to get it right. Ecology & Co was born when co-founder Diana Miller found alcohol didn't agree with her following the birth of her daughter. The serial entrepreneur had given her husband a hobby still as a gift. It was a perfect storm in a highball glass.
Says Miller: "One day, he brought me a drink and said, 'Try this,' and I'm like, 'I can't drink a gin. I won't sleep well tonight,' and he's going, 'Go on – try it.' So I drank it. I was like, 'Well, this is really good. But you know …' And he's like, 'No, it's alcohol-free.'"
Now she could be the sober driver and still feel like an adult when they went out. The company produces two main products: London Dry and Asian Spice "botanical blend distilled alcohol-free spirits", plus two prepared drinks. It was launched four years ago, and has a Callaghan Innovation award and the turnover to prove it's doing something right: "We more than double our sales every year and are growing at a very rapid pace," Miller says.
The production process is complex, involving many steps. Importantly, "we don't actually do any fermentation". Unlike other products, which have the alcohol removed during production, there's no alcohol produced at any point in the process.
"It takes eight to 12 hours to do a distillation of one botanical. And we do one distillation per day. And at the end of a couple of weeks, you've got 10 different distillations you can then blend together."
Which also explains why, even though they incur no alcohol excise tax, most non-alcoholic drinks are around the $60 mark for 700ml bottles. It's a complaint often made by consumers dipping a toe in the water that these drinks aren't cheaper.
Ecology & Co intends to stick to its small but perfectly formed selections. By contrast, Lyre's range, named for the Australian native bird which is a famed mimic (geddit?), has 18 alcohol substitutes. David Murphy was recently in Auckland to launch the company's Highland Malt – "lovely, deep flavours of toffee, spiced oak and nutty grains with a firm, dry finish".
In its three years of existence, Lyre's has expanded into more than 70 countries. "The idea at the beginning was to try and [supply non-alcoholic substitutes to] make the top-50 selling cocktails," says Murphy. The company aimed to sell a million bottles in its first year and hit that target in 11 months. It has won a top shelf full of international awards. Its Italian Orange non-alcoholic spirit was recently nominated alongside several alcoholic beverages in the best new ingredient category in the international Spirited Awards.
It is getting closer to its goal of having "a bottle of Lyre's behind every bar in every part of the world" and becoming a generic – Lyre's wants to be to non-alcoholic drinks what Dyson is to vacuum cleaners.
And you can buy it at Countdown.
Although supermarkets have stocked low-no beer and wine for some time now, it could be argued that the quality has only recently justified their inclusion.
Denise Garland is a beer writer, enthusiast and certified cicerone – sommelier for beer, basically – who embraces low-no products wholeheartedly and says the bar is now set high.
"Over the last 18 months, we've really seen a huge amount of growth," says Garland. "Before that, you could probably count on one hand the number of no-alcohol beer options and they would have all been from European brewers, and, I guess, Heineken Zero. Amazing other options have come up from New Zealand craft brewers, and Lion has recently jumped on the bandwagon with Mac's Stunt Double."
The wine industry didn't need low-no product breathing down its neck to catch a chill. A shortage of wine caused by small crops in recent years saw stocks drop to worrying levels and the lowest domestic sales since 2004. However, the industry body NZ Winegrowers has reported a bumper 2022 harvest that should provide the turnaround it needs.
Winemakers have struggled to provide a non-alcoholic drop that comes anywhere near satisfying the traditional drinker. Wine writer MermaidMary has good news and bad. She is full of praise for several Giesen Wines products but warns that, in general, "it works best in the white, and the rosé space, which usually sits under white wines. Every non-alcoholic red I have tasted so far is absolutely disgusting."
Although some oenophiles insist the no-alcohol product shouldn't even be called wine, MermaidMary says they have it wrong. Instead, drinkers need to re-educate their palates to accept that 0% wine is always going to taste different, but can provide its own satisfactions. "Don't go in looking for the same thing, because it's not the same thing."
Giesen's progress has been entirely deliberate, according to its marketing manager, Angela Flynn. The company now has several 0 per cent varieties and has done well in the non-alcoholic section of awards.
Echoing MermaidMary's strictures about wine snobbery, Flynn notes the company met resistance from writers and the trade when trying to launch its first no-alcohol sauvignon blanc two years ago. So it changed tack.
"We looked at selling direct-to-consumer through our own online store, and supported that with a social media campaign. And the response we had from consumers was overwhelmingly positive." They took that story back to the shops. "We said, 'Look, your consumers are really wanting to have something like this'. And that helped us get over the line."
Accessibility is one of the many not-so-simple issues around low-no drinks. People have to be able to buy them. The question is, which people and within what guidelines? The weight of opinion seems to support them being available subject to the same restrictions as alcoholic drinks.
It's not clear what, if any, difference the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Renewal of Licences) Amendment Bill will make to any of this. At the moment, the law around display is vague, but Countdown's alcohol responsibility manager, Paul Radich, says: "We choose to stock these products in the alcohol section of our stores and to sell them with the same type of restrictions, because they are marketed as being an alcohol alternative for adults and are often produced by existing liquor companies under known brands."
Simon Adamson, director of the National Addiction Centre at the University of Otago, Christchurch, says he supports "the current handling [of these drinks] being in the alcohol aisle in supermarkets and requiring over-18 ID for purchase. Some see this as absurd but the alternative is being relaxed about children of any age consuming what could effectively be considered 'practice alcohol' – although, of course, it's a pretty expensive option compared to a bottle of Coke."
However, the availability and consistency of supply of many non-alcoholic alternatives can be patchy at best. Which is where clearheaddrinks.co.nz comes in. The online retailer was started, like many of these businesses, by someone who wanted to drink less and was having trouble finding suitable alternatives.
"A lot of the options were pretty rubbish," says founder Ricky Bartlett. "Europe and Canada and the US, and to a degree Australia, were well ahead of where we were." Clear Head was launched last August so "people like myself, who want to maybe stop drinking or just want an alternative, have somewhere to go that stocks whatever they need".
He has "probably a couple of hundred" products across beer, wine and spirit substitutes available through the site, including all the labels already mentioned, and others you've never heard of.
There's no doubt, as the figures quoted at the start of this story show – and as TV journalist Paddy Gower in his recent Three special On Booze demonstrated with his own drinking habits – that the country has an expensive alcohol problem. No-alcohol products may seem to offer a way out. But for a reformed alcoholic, having access to a beverage that closely mimics the taste of alcohol could be triggering and tempt them to start drinking again. There are those in recovery who will not go near these products.
"In general, however," says Adamson, "for people who have experienced a drinking problem, they have generally been a very positive development. I don't see them as a danger."
Non-alcoholic alternatives will reduce problem drinking only if people actually consume them as a substitute. Questions of availability aside, some people may need convincing that they are an acceptable option.
Susan Bagshaw says presenting the drinks as sophisticated and a bit edgy will help them to be accepted by that fickle 18-plus age group. "They definitely have to be cool." Ironically, reduced accessibility promotes this. That's why confining them to the same part of the supermarket as alcohol "is important".
There are other counterintuitive selling points. Making non-alcoholic cocktails expensive is one. "If you go out for dinner, and you spend $4," says Lyre's Murphy, "that isn't overly exciting. But if I spend 100 bucks on cocktails – wow, that's amazing."
Also, non-alcoholic spirits can be used to make elaborate mocktails, with all the palaver that involves, to recreate the rituals that mark the end of the work day or week, or special occasions.
"The industry certainly claims that this is the silver bullet," notes Jackson, observing that changes are small and slow. "Within a small subgroup of beer drinkers, there have been some tiny shifts in the amount of beer purchased. So I think this year, the Brewers Association of New Zealand showed that about 2% of supermarket sales of beer were of the non-alcohol variety."
Non-alcoholic spirit sales through liquor stores – half of all retail sales – increased by an impressive 38 per cent in the past 22 months, albeit that represented a dollar total of just $213,000.
Without exception, makers and sellers of non-alcoholic drinks say they aren't against alcohol. They are about moderation, not prohibition. Which, in practice, means adding non-alcs to regular wine, beer or spirits as part of your weekly beverage package, so you can have an alcohol-free Monday or a social drink and still drive home.
The problem with that, says Jackson, is that "they're placing alcohol in a situation where normally we wouldn't have alcohol". Many people didn't realise they wanted a drink on Monday.
Which is why winemakers can afford to promote non-alcoholic wine alongside their regular product.
“The really interesting thing about this is that sales of 0% wine are not cannibalising sales of full-strength wine,” says Giesen’s Flynn. “We were wondering, crikey, is this going to take share off our wine? But it hasn’t at all.”
